Re: rationale for inclusion of hgroup in html5?

Leif Halvard Silli wrote:

> <hgroup> currently turns all its children into a single heading - 
> according to Ian. Such a thing could be described as information loss. 
> To say that the <hgroup> contains two _headings_ but only one of them 
> shows in the ToC is a different from HTML5's current solution which is 
> that two or more children of a <hgroup> is treated as a multi-paragraph 
> single heading with special rules for which part goes into the ToC.

Where is such written? If I look at

http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.html#the-hgroup-element

I read: "For the purposes of document summaries, outlines, and the like,
the text of hgroup elements is defined to be the text of the highest
ranked h1–h6 element descendant of the hgroup element..."

so only the first <hx> is treated as a header for outline.

But anyway I think that <hgroup> serve no useful purpose. Why it is not
sufficient to say that for outline:

- all <hx> elements are considered
- if there are multiple <hx> elements inside <header> only first of them
is considered

I can imagine even more radical solutions:

1) drop outline from spec completely

2) define outline to work only on explicitly marked-up <section>s

But before delving too much into details shouldn't we ask "why is there
outline algorithm in the spec?". What's the use case it solves?

   Jirka


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Received on Thursday, 27 January 2011 15:16:29 UTC