Re: Naming of <header>

On Fri, 27 Mar 2009, James Graham wrote:
>
> At risk of creating a bikeshed discussion…
> 
> The <header> element's name seems to be creating some considerable 
> confusion, with authors either assuming it designed to be used for all 
> page header content or that it is designed to replace <h1>-<h6> and be a 
> generic heading element (e.g. [1], [2] and note that these are the tiny 
> fraction of people who are motivated to ask about these things upfront). 
> Almost no one seems to guess that it is supposed to be used for grouping 
> multiple heading/subheadings into an overall heading. This implies that 
> it will be poorly used in practice and so UAs will not be able to 
> reliably implement e.g. the outline algorithm since it will give 
> unexpected results on real sites.

The name used is the most commonly used name for the class that means the 
same thing. If people naturally use this name for this purpose, why would 
they get confused when other people use the name for that purpose?


On Fri, 27 Mar 2009, Joshue O Connor wrote:
> 
> Yes, I agree. There needs to be some way to better distinguish the 
> <header> element in terms of its functionality. Throw a couple of ARIA 
> role type elements into the mix and you have a riot in the bikeshed.

Presumably one would not need to use the relevant ARIA roles if one was 
using the HTML elements.


On Fri, 27 Mar 2009, James Graham wrote:
> 
> Several of those sites use it unnecessarily to wrap <hn> elements, suggesting
> that they have not fully grasped the point of the element.

That appears harmless.


> Moreover that is a hugely biased sample because they are early adopters, 
> all of whom are likely to be aware of tools like validators.

The people who have expressed confusion are also early adopters. :-)


On Fri, 27 Mar 2009, James Graham wrote:
>
> Oh and another related point is that doing something like
> 
>  <article>
>    <header>
>      <h1>My blog post</h1>
>      <p>2022-01-01T01:01</p>
>    </header>
>    <section>
>      <p>This is the content</p>
>    </section>
>  </article>
> 
> seems to be rather common. This is technically wrong because it makes 
> the content a subsection of the article and so, technically, not titled 
> by it. It would be better in this case if untitled sectioning elements 
> collapsed from the point of view of the outline algorithm.

This is just an example of people using <section> as a "semantic <div>" 
(incorrectly); I don't think we necessarily want to encourage that by 
making it less of a problem.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
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