[Bug 11199] New: Need standard way to creating heading "streams"

http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=11199

           Summary: Need standard way to creating heading "streams"
           Product: HTML WG
           Version: unspecified
          Platform: All
        OS/Version: All
            Status: NEW
          Severity: normal
          Priority: P2
         Component: HTML5 spec (editor: Ian Hickson)
        AssignedTo: ian@hixie.ch
        ReportedBy: laurent.goderre@gmail.com
         QAContact: public-html-bugzilla@w3.org
                CC: mike@w3.org, public-html-wg-issue-tracking@w3.org,
                    public-html@w3.org


It is important to define the document structure with proper heading to make
the document more understandable to search engines and more easily navigable by
Adaptive Technology. However as of now, there is now way to create a proper web
page structure for page with navigational elements etc. The new nav, header and
footer HTML 5 element help but from experience, nothing helps screen readers
and other adaptive technologies like a clean and proper heading structure.
Elements if these header, footer and nav needs to be defined in a hierarchy as
well to allow users to jump to the breadcrumb section, navigation or any major
part of the page. 

When trying to do so, web developers hit a major wall and debates arise. Some
say that the page hierarchy should start with a h1 building the structure of
the page until the main document is reach and another h1 starts it. Others
claim that there can't be more than one h1 per page and this structure should
be under the main document which is argued by some to be incorect because in
many case these element are global to every page and therefore would not make
sense to be under the document structure.

A solution I was thinking about was to create heading structure streams to
allow multiple heading structures and allow user to switch to the one they
want, may it be the navigation stream or the main document stream. This would
also help search engine to assign weight to content by knowing what is relevant
to the document and what has  navigational purpose.

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Received on Tuesday, 2 November 2010 18:19:21 UTC