- From: Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>
- Date: Fri, 12 Nov 2004 10:17:41 +0000 (UTC)
On Sun, 29 Aug 2004, James Graham wrote:
> >
> > > On the other hand, there is some merit to a situation in which
> > > <section> creates structure and the choice of n in <h{n}> denotes
> > > the 'importance' of the heading relative to the content of the page
> > > (so, for example, search bots give lower weight to <h6> elements
> > > than <h1> elements regardless of the nesting).
> >
> > I considered this, but making <h1>-<h6> have _different_ semantics
> > than each other in <section> elements basically makes it impossible to
> > do the whole backwards-compatibility trick.
>
> In principle, I think I see the point. In practice the way that many
> authors seem to use the existing <h1> to <h6> elements is broadly
> compatible with this principle (iirc the HTML 4 spec states that the
> different elements denote the "importance" of different heading levels.
> Authors tend to ignore the following text stating that headings can be
> used to create a document outline and mark e.g. headings in their
> sidebar as being lower importance than headings in the main document
> even if, structurally, they're at the same depth. This makes creating a
> useful outline impossible but does mean that some search bots give
> higher weight to more important content.).
>
> From my limited observation of author practice, the most
> backward/author-compatible heading model I can imagine is:
>
> The semantics of h1...h6 elements that are the first h1...h6 child of a
> <section> element is the heading for that section. Subsequent h1...h6
> elements in the same <section> are subheadings (in the sense of sub
> titles e.g. "A New Hope" in "Star Wars - A New Hope") of that section.
> h1....h6 elements have decreasing levels of importance with h1 being the
> most important and h6 the least. Higher level headings tags should be
> used to mark the headings most important to the page content as a whole
> and low level headings should be used to mark less significant
> divisions.
That would work except that if we do this we have to abandon the idea of
having <h1> be automatically sized to fit the nesting level, and
<h2>..<h6> left with existing renderings for compatibility, since
otherwise you'll end up with "subheadings" that are twice as large as the
section headings.
I think it's very important that authors be able to keep using their
existing documents, just throwing in <section> elements where they want
them, without all the styles changing.
> I've noticed sites that use the "a second heading in a <div> is a
> subheading" paradigm- Off the top of my head, both Eric Meyer
> (meyerweb.com) and Dave Shea (mezzoblue.com) do this in their weblogs.
Yeah, the <header> element currently in the draft would be the way to do
that. It lets you do slightly more, as well, such as:
<header>
<p>Welcome to...</p>
<h1>Voidwars!</h1>
</header>
...or including author information in the <header> (see the draft for
another example).
> The most obvious use case I have in mind would be a UA hiding certian
> sections of the page so that the content was easilly accessible. It
> might therefore be goood to have a general purpose <chrome> element to
> denote a section of the page other than the main content. One could then
> subdivide using an attribute (<chrome type="header"> <chrome
> type="footer"> and so on). This is, at least, easilly extendable and
> allows a browser to use CSS like "chrome {display:none;}". For
> document-type pages, it might be good to have <pullout> or something to
> define a box of content that related to a part of the article but was
> not in the main flow. This would be superior to just using <section> or
> <div> with float because it would work in non-visual browsers. I think a
> well-defined way of adding footnotes would be popular although it's not
> quite in the same class of functionality.
In the current draft:
"Chrome": <header>, <footer>, <sidebar>, <navigation>
"Content": <article>
Maybe we should make <article> more general-purpose? I hesitate to call it
<content> because it would be really weird to have multiple <content>
blocks on the page -- I'm looking for an element that can be used to mark
up a forum post / blog article / etc.
Maybe we do need both <content> and <article>, although that's starting to
seem a little excessive and I'd rather remove some of these elements than
add more.
> > We'll probably keep it to a minimum though. The idea is just to
> > relieve the most common pseudo-semantic uses of <div>.
>
> Ideally we could get a large sample of actual sites to find out what the
> most common uses acttually are. Is there an existing bot avaliable that
> would allow one to spider (part of!) the web and extract the classnames
> given to <div> elements?
We (Opera) are working to see what can be done along those lines.
--
Ian Hickson U+1047E )\._.,--....,'``. fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/ U+263A /, _.. \ _\ ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer. `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
Received on Friday, 12 November 2004 02:17:41 UTC