- From: James Graham <jg307@cam.ac.uk>
- Date: Wed, 28 Nov 2007 18:01:43 +0000
- To: Justin Thorp <juth@loc.gov>
- CC: joshue.oconnor@cfit.ie, Ben Boyle <benjamins.boyle@gmail.com>, Terry Morris <lsnbluff@gmail.com>, Lachlan Hunt <lachlan.hunt@lachy.id.au>, "public-html@w3.org" <public-html@w3.org>
Justin Thorp wrote: > In my humble opinion, it seems like the use of h1-h6 headers is much easier for an author to wrap their head around then deriving structure of the a section & header combination. > > With the H1-H6 headers, it's easer for a human to read the code and infer what the structure of the document is. It's much harder to read through nested section elements. > > That and practically I could see the section tag being abused just as much as the div tag. > > I don't understand what we get by adding it. Consider for example a river-of-news style blog aggregator (like planet / Venus). There we are pulling in content from a variety of sources into a single document. Each of those individual pieces of content has a heading structure of its own; the aggregator will presumably add further headings. As I understand it, the HTML 5 heading algorithm, when used in combination with elements such as <section> and <article>, produces the expected outline without requiring the aggregator to rewrite all the headings from the aggregated content. For example, the following markup: <body> <h1>Planet HTML</h1> <article> <h2>W3C - HTML 5 Last Call</h2> <section> <h2>First article heading</h2> [...] <h2>Second article heading> </section> </article> <article> <h2>mozilla.org - Firefox 6 Released</h2> <section> <h1>First article heading</h1> <h2>First article subheading</h2> </section> </article> </body> would (I believe) have an outline like: Planet HTML |-- W3C - HTML 5 Last Call |-- First article heading |-- Second article heading |--mozilla.org - Firefox 6 Released |-- First article heading |--First article subheading So there is a use case for explicit sectioning elements and a requirement to support HTML 4-style headings along with the sectioning elements in a well-defined way. Given this, I don't see the value of adding a <h> element to accompany <section>; it just adds to confusion as its not clear what markup like: <h>Heading 1</h> <h2>Heading 2</h2> <h>Heading 3</h> <h3>Heading 4</h3> should mean. Is Heading 2 at the same level as Heading 1 or one level deeper? In practice I suspect you would end up defining <h> to behave like <h1> in the existing HTML 5 algorithm; I'm not sure that throwing a new element into the mix that is a synonym for an existing element will actually help understanding. -- "Eternity's a terrible thought. I mean, where's it all going to end?" -- Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
Received on Wednesday, 28 November 2007 18:02:06 UTC