RE: [#925] mandatory H1 (Braille Formatting)

Lisa Seeman writes:
 > 
 > My take on H1,
 > 
 > Issue one is exceedingly important. Having a good logical structure in a
 > document, and, having that structure correctly reflected in the mark up
 > helps people find there way around a document. It helps create
 > summaries, and schematics of a document, table of content, automatic
 > logical tabbing through content, and enables skimming for many use
 > groups such as the visibly impaired and people with learning
 > disabilities. 

It also permits proper styling of the content in whatever modality and
with whatever device characteristics may be necessary. The styling
conveys crucial semantics to the reader that might not otherwise be
obvious, namely that this is a heading at such-and-such a level in the hierarchy.
 > 
 > I would suggest that this is an important requirement.
 > 
 > The second issue is good idea only when it upholds the first issue.
 > In other words when the first header logically is a header one, then it
 > must be marked as such. However sometimes the logic of the page the
 > first header is not a header one (such as a menu bas comes first with a
 > heading two).  It should not be marked as a header one to fulfill an
 > arbitrate check.
 > 
 > In other words starting with a header one is a good machine test that
 > headers are being used in order and correctly. It is true a lot of the
 > time. But as it is not true all the time I would not put it as  a
 > requirement.
 > 
I agree. Also, suppose a large document is split, most likely
automatically, into a number of separate "pages", to conserve
network band width especially for mobile devices. Each page contains
only a subsection of the document. While the document as a whole
should logically begin with an H1, the individual page served to the
client could be just a small section at a fairly low level of the
hierarchy, such as H3, H4, H5 etc. I think the correct solution is to
mark up the section heading according to its place in the whole
document, and not to treat each page as though it were an independent
document in itself.

Of course, in the original source file, the heading would be marked up
properly. This would also assist the document splitting algorithm and
enable navigational structures to be built automatically (this is in
fact how HTML generators often work).

Received on Monday, 30 August 2004 01:24:05 UTC