Re: accessify.com's review of RNIB relaunch

On Wednesday, June 25, 2003, at 07:17  AM, tina@greytower.net wrote:
> On 25 Jun, Lauke   PH wrote:
>>>   It would be pointless to argue such details as why he believes a h2
>>>   without a h1 to be "structurally incorrect"
>>
>> So why isn't it incorrect ? If the number of the heading denotes a 
>> sense
>> of heirarchy, how can there be an h2 without an h1 ? Maybe i'm missing
>> something ?
>
>   But DOES it denote a sense of hierarchy, or a sense of importance ?

Yes, by design.

The most common problem with designers' use of <h1> to <h6> is their 
reliance on the visual presentation (that is, the built-in style) of 
the elements, rather than using the elements structurally and altering 
their style. In fact, on my personal site, my <h1> is actually smaller 
than the <h2>s. It's more important to have that structure than to deal 
with the header elements as presentational.

>   How would you, for instance, mark up a document that has two headers,
>   both of equal importance, and both more important than every other
>   header ?
>   Two <h1> ? That would violate the hiearchial model.

No, it wouldn't. Nobody said you can't have more than one <h1> in a 
document. (Unlike XML, where you can only have one root element.)

People should think of their header elements like outlines, since that 
was really what they were designed to do.

>   These questions are among those brought with us to XHTML 2.0 and the
>   "future". Some versions of HTML require that headers be hierarchial,
>   but none of those are W3C versions (afaik) - in HTML 4.01 and XHTML 
> so
>   far there is no grammatical or semantical requirement that h2 follows
>   h1 and soforth.

XHTML 2 is introducing a <section> element, so that headers within a 
given section would "know" which level they are.

-
m

Received on Wednesday, 25 June 2003 12:14:21 UTC