Re: HTML 5 Authoring Guidelines Proposal the use of the section element and its potential impact on screen reader users

(My answers here are based on the current text of HTML5, which could of 
course change.)

On Wed, 28 Nov 2007, Ben Boyle wrote:
> 
> If I have a block of content, I can mark that with <section>. [...]
>
> Now, that section can be nested in many different documents in many 
> different places, and I don't care if the heading is "h1" or "h6" ... I 
> only care that it is the heading for that section. This is what I want. 
> [...]
> 
> [...] if I then include that section 3 levels deep in another document, 
> does the use of <h1> assign it higher significance?

No.


> What if there are sibling sections from other sources that use <h2> 
> instead? Are they of less importance? [...]

Same importance.

The relative ranks (the 1-6 part of <h1>-<h6>) only have an effect within
the scope of an actual sectioning element (like <section>), and don't 
affect anything else.


(Note that <header> is just a wrapper around one or more <hx> elements. 
It can't be used without an <hx> descendant.)


> [...] I'm just confused by the potential conflict for the between the 
> heading level explicitly defined by the h1-h6 tags vs the inferred 
> heading level based on their placement within nested sections of a 
> document. Which has precedence?

It's all defined in detail here:

   http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/section-sections.html#headings

There are examples there too which may be of use if the prose is not very 
clear. I do think that the Author's Guide that Lachlan is working on could 
benefit from having a more readable (and less pedantic) version of the 
algorithms described in the aforementioned section. I think that would be 
really helpful to authors, because the actual exact pedantic algorithms 
are not very easy to understand.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Thursday, 29 November 2007 03:51:10 UTC