Re: hgroup: a possible alternative

I had submitted an example of a wording change in Bugzilla

http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=11466

This is not really a change proposal, since I still support the concept of <hgroup> but believe the explanation needs clearer wording and additional examples.

-Doug Jones

On 2011 Jan 10, at 05:44, Toby Inkster wrote:

> Not sure if there's an open issue on hgroup that's accepting change
> proposals, but here's the stub of an alternative idea for discussion
> anyway.
> 
> It seems to me that much of the dislike of <hgroup> can be solved by
> turning it inside out. Instead of:
> 
> 	<hgroup>
> 		<h1>Medieval Beekeeping</h1>
> 		<h2>The evolution of an artform</h2>
> 	</hgroup>
> 
> You could have:
> 
> 	<h1>
> 		<hline>Medieval Beekeeping</hline>
> 		<hline small>The evolution of an artform</hline>
> 	</h1>
> 
> <hline> would be a brand new element with an optional boolean attribute
> "small". You'd normally style it something like this:
> 
> 	hline { display:block; }
> 	hline[small] { font-size: smaller; }
> 
> The "small" attribute it not really presentational - it indicates a line
> within the heading of lesser significance. If someone can think of a
> better name for it, please do so.
> 
> Why <hline> and not <div> or <p>? Because allowing block elements within
> a heading breaks the content model of headings going back pre-HTML-2.0
> and would require incompatible changes to parsers.
> 
> Stephen Stewart recently posted a link to http://goo.gl/5wCVt - a very
> interesting book chapter that deals with headlines from a newspaper
> editors' perspective and contains several good examples of multi-part
> headers, some of which seem like they could be better represented via
> the <hline> construct (often by adding class attributes to hlines)
> rather than <hgroup>. Here are some of the examples from that article
> marked up using <hline>:
> 
> 	<h1>
> 	  <hline small class="kicker">Weird science</hline>
> 	  <hline>High school inventions lean toward the wacky</hline>
> 	</h1>
> 
> 	<h1>
> 	  <hline class="hammer">Clinton <strong>Acquitted</strong></hline>
> 	  <hline small>Perjury, obstruction charges defeated</hline>
> 	</h1>
> 
> 	<h1>
> 	  <hline>Olympic bid may be probed</hline>
> 	  <hline small class="underline">Gift violation may reopen Atlanta case</hline>
> 	</h1>
> 
> 	<h1>
> 	  <hline small class="summary">Gov. Jesse Ventura blended
> 	    his new job with an old one, filling in for a day as a
> 	    talk-show host on KSTP Radio</hline>
> 	  <hline>Broadcast muse</hline>
> 	</h1>
> 
> There is one possible problem with this approach: headings are
> traditionally written without terminal punctuation unless the
> punctuation is especially significant (e.g. an exclamation point or
> question mark). Given that, older screen readers which would not be
> aware of the semantics of <hline> could possibly run the lines of the
> heading into each other as a single sentence. I'm not sure if a
> display:block presentation has any effect on this. If someone could test
> whether the following is run together as a single sentence in screen
> readers, that might help...
> 
> 	<div>
> 	  <span style="display:block">Hello world</span>
> 	  <span style="display:block">Hello world</span>
> 	</div>
> 
> -- 
> Toby A Inkster
> <mailto:mail@tobyinkster.co.uk>
> <http://tobyinkster.co.uk>
> 
>

Received on Monday, 10 January 2011 21:18:43 UTC