[Bug 25003] modify required heading mappings to reflect reality

https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=25003

--- Comment #4 from Dominic Mazzoni <dmazzoni@google.com> ---
Here's my reasoning.

One reason is that I don't think it's always possible to nest sections
properly, even when the web author has the best intentions. In order to achieve
the desired layout, an author may make two sections siblings, even though one
is a subsection of the other. In other cases an author might not have a choice
because they're mashing up content from different sources to generate the final
webpage - for example a news site may mix a hand-authored page template with
article content generated by a CMS and then a commenting plug-in. It's just not
always possible to make the resulting HTML nest properly when you do that.

Authors can place <h1>, <h2>, <h3> tags anywhere in the document. This creates
a logical hierarchy that's often better than the actual hierarchy of the DOM,
which has other constraints (due to mash-ups, layout issues, etc.). I consider
this an advantage, not a disadvantage.

So I don't think there's anything wrong with a "flat" layout, like this:

<h1>Main title</h1>

<h2>Section One</h2>

Text

<h3>Subsection</h3>

Text

<h2>Section Two</h2>

Text

<h3>Subsection</h3>

Text

This works fine now - why break it?

It seems like following the spec as currently written would either break
backward compatibility or increase complexity. Many screen readers currently
announce "heading level 3" when they encounter an h3 element. Either they'd
need to change their behavior to announce a level based on the nesting level
(which would certainly degrade the experience of many webpages that aren't
authored using nesting sections), or they'd have to handle native heading
elements and ARIA headings separately, which seems like a needless
complication.

Last, not a very important point but I'd note that AT can easily infer the
nesting level by walking up the parent chain - so it's not critical that apps
expose it. The "logical" heading level is more important to expose.

-- 
You are receiving this mail because:
You are the QA Contact for the bug.

Received on Wednesday, 12 March 2014 16:41:23 UTC