Naming of <header>

At risk of creating a bikeshed discussion…

The <header> element's name seems to be creating some considerable 
confusion, with authors either assuming it designed to be used for all 
page header content or that it is designed to replace <h1>-<h6> and be a 
generic heading element (e.g. [1], [2] and note that these are the tiny 
fraction of people who are motivated to ask about these things upfront). 
Almost no one seems to guess that it is supposed to be used for grouping 
multiple heading/subheadings into an overall heading. This implies that 
it will be poorly used in practice and so UAs will not be able to 
reliably implement e.g. the outline algorithm since it will give 
unexpected results on real sites.


This problem can be easily solved by giving the element a less 
misleading name, like <hgroup> or <headinggroup> or something.

[1] http://krijnhoetmer.nl/irc-logs/whatwg/20090327#l-13
[2] http://krijnhoetmer.nl/irc-logs/whatwg/20090327#l-596

Received on Friday, 27 March 2009 12:19:03 UTC