Outline when article is entire body of document

The HTML5 <article> element seems potentially very useful, but there
seems to me to be an aspect of the overall design that makes it work
not quite as well as it might.

I'm guessing that HTML5 is designed to support the scenario where an
author creates create potentially reusable chunks of HTML5 content,
which are then assembled by the publishing system into valid HTML5
documents, where these reusable chunks would typically use <article>
or <section> as their root element.  The problem with the current
design seems to me to occur when you want such a chunk to be the
entire content of a page.  I don't see any way to get the "right"
outline without modifying the reusable chunk. If I simply wrap the
<article> in a <body> in the obvious way:

<html>
<head>...</head>
<body>
<article>
<h1>Article title</h1>
...
</article>
</body>
</html>

then I get an outline, according to [1], where the <body> node is a
section with an implied heading containing a single section with a
"Article title" heading, whereas I would want to get the same outline
as:

<html>
<head>...</head>
<body>
<h1>Article title</h1>
...
</body>
</html>

One way round this might be a "nosection" boolean attribute on <body>,
which would say to the outline algorithm not to create a section for
the <body> element, and which would be valid only when the <body>
element consists of a single sectioning content element.

James

[1] http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.html#outlines

Received on Monday, 8 November 2010 03:17:49 UTC