- From: Joshue O Connor <joshue.oconnor@cfit.ie>
- Date: Tue, 27 Nov 2007 22:48:24 +0000
- To: Ben Boyle <benjamins.boyle@gmail.com>
- CC: Lachlan Hunt <lachlan.hunt@lachy.id.au>, James Graham <jg307@cam.ac.uk>, Terry Morris <lsnbluff@gmail.com>, "public-html@w3.org" <public-html@w3.org>
Hi Ben, >but I'd love to use a truly generic element for a > heading when that's what I want, rather than markup documents with the > idea "oh, these <h1> elements ... they're generic headings, they > don't, you know, *have* to be level 1 ..." I am probably missing something here but can we not already do this with HTML? The difference being that the cognitive load is on the author as they have to think about *how* they structure content and apply the mark up accordingly. Is this what you mean? Is it the case that a generic element is a convenient mechanism for those authors who don't want to *think* about how to structure content? If so, on one level I can understand this. For example users of AT can extract headings and learn about their importance from the use of author applied h1 - h6 elements. However, in many cases what is important to the user is that the heading *is* there and not necessarily whether they have been correctly applied. So on one level the use of a generic heading element could be good, as it may get old school semantically shy authors actually using headings, and that is a good thing. However my worry about using generic elements is exactly that the inferred structure or the ability to infer structure could be lost. At least having h1-h6 gave the author a ready made "semantic toolkit" using a generic element takes that away IMO. Josh
Received on Tuesday, 27 November 2007 22:48:46 UTC