Re: elements for basic academic articles

Hi Silvio,

On 01/12/2015 10:36 , Silvio Peroni wrote:
> In RASH (https://github.com/essepuntato/rash/), we use a different
> approach to deal with the headings that is basically handled by nested
> section. The idea is to use always “h1” element to identify section
> titles, while the way they are visualised by a browser is handled by CSS
> and strictly dependent on the actual position in the hierarchical
> organisation of the sections/sub-sections. Here an example:

I think it's fair to say that we've all been attracted to this model at
one point or another :) It is, in fact, still an ongoing dispute in the
HTML world (see
https://github.com/scienceai/scholarly.vernacular.io/issues/39 for a bit
more details).

I think that this boils down to the sort of decision about authoring
versus interchange formats I made in another thread. The sort of model
you describe is great for authors. You don't have to care where you are,
you can just paste stuff around, and it works. It would be a great model
if it were actually supported properly in browsers, in AT, in search
engines... but we still to this today do not have an outline model that
we can agree on.

In an authoring tool, that doesn't matter. For instance in ReSpec I
support pretty much what you describe: you can use any h1-h6 and it will
*convert* it to the element with the correct depth
(http://www.w3.org/respec/guide.html#sections).

But that works because there's a transformation step. For an interchange
format, we need something that just works with the existing semantics of
HTML, not just from spec but largely as understood by existing and
widely used tools too. Sadly, that won't fly. Maybe some day!

-- 
• Robin Berjon - http://berjon.com/ - @robinberjon
• http://science.ai/ — intelligent science publishing
•

Received on Tuesday, 1 December 2015 17:11:29 UTC