Re: Validity constraints on <section>

This requirement for a heading seems to exclude
the element section for example to use it to markup a
stanza of a poem (including only div elements for the lines).
Well, at least this is consistent with the general efforts
of HTML(5) to make it difficult to markup this kind of texts
in a meaningful way ;o)
Meanwhile I think, the best approach is to use only div elements
for the markup of the complete poem - or to use XML-fragments
in another namespace for such kinds of text not covered at all by HTML5
elements with semantical meaning.
Another approach at least for books in the format EPUB 3 is to use the
type attribute of the EPUB/OPS namespace to indicate the
meaning of the div elements, with RDFa one can use the property 
element for this purpose, one 'only' has to reference an element in 
an appropriate vocabulary (for example LML) to indicate the meaning ;o)
Unfortunately because there is no generic HTML5 attribute to
do this, the chance is in practice pretty low, that anybody will
notice such relevant semantic refinements. This means, not
much stimulation for most authors to use semantic markup at all.

Another previous use case for a section without a heading
was for me some kind of overview before the detailed content
of the document - to have a heading with 'Overview' or 'Abstract' 
is sometimes pretty redundant - because this would be only a functional
description and the main heading/title of the document contains already
the content related description.
Because HTML5 has no specific elements for this, again now one
can use a div here for this purpose as in previous versions of (X)HTML. 
In EPUB 3 books again one can use their extension vocabulary to indicate 
the function of such a div ;o) The same can be done with the 
recommendations for XHTML+RDFa 1.0/1.1 for other applications.

If there are too many constraints on the small HTML5 collection of elements
with semantical meaning, this means not much stimulation to use it at all,
if one anyway has to reference other vocabularies in many cases.

For section it might be a help to say only, that one may avoid phrasing 
content, because in typical viewers the presentation of a section element
is not a meaningful indication of a section.

Olaf

Received on Thursday, 17 October 2013 09:27:24 UTC