RE: Validity constraints on <section>

Robin Berjon wrote:
"I've therefore been wondering: would it make sense to make section invalid
if it does not have heading content as its direct children?"

Yes, it makes complete sense to me.

The excessive use of <section> is even more problematic if you happen to use
a screen reader. The start and end of each section is announced, and that
adds a lot of verbosity to even a simple page.

The lockerz.com homepage has 108 regions (screen readers use the region role
mapping to report section elements). That's 216 announcements on a single
page.

One example on the lockerz.com homepage causes my screen reader to announce
the following:
 
"Region"
"Region"
"Region"
"Region"
"Region"
"Region"
"Link graphic W310/image0013620927118302ukw51"
"Region end"
"Region"

The graphical link without a text description only compounds the problem.
But there is definitely a case for requiring <section> to have a heading as
direct child content.

Léonie.

-- 
Carpe diem.



 
-----Original Message-----
From: Robin Berjon [mailto:robin@w3.org] 
Sent: 21 March 2013 10:02
To: HTML WG (public-html@w3.org)
Subject: Validity constraints on <section>

Hi,

there are increasing concerns over the excessive use of <section>. Some
authors seem to basically think of it as "sexy modern <div>" for no
particular reason (a good example: http://lockerz.com/).

The specification does have some advice about only using <section> for
content that is meant to appear in the document outline, but given that the
outline doesn't show up anywhere, that's not something that's ever likely to
stop this drift.

I've therefore been wondering: would it make sense to make section invalid
if it does not have heading content as its direct children? Put differently,
what are the use cases for a headless section?

--
Robin Berjon - http://berjon.com/ - @robinberjon

Received on Thursday, 21 March 2013 14:15:53 UTC