Use of the <h1> element

Greetings All

I have three questions regarding the <h1> element that I would like to put to you:

1) Use of the same <h1> content throughout a collection of pages.  If a Web site 
or collection of pages covers one topic, even if by this a topic can be 
something like "Fred's Family Web Site", would it be reasonable to say that all 
pages should have the same <h1> content, with an <h2> to denote specific page 
content?

I ask this because I don't see a true way of saying, within (X)HTML, "this page 
is part of a collection".  We can do this, or course, by inserting metadata into 
the page, but this is not actually (X)HTML as such.  <link rel="prev"/> and 
other <head> elements may convey a navigation structure but still, as far as I 
can see, fail to identify the actual collection of pages in which we are working.

I feel that, from an accessibility point of view, especially if we are trying to 
use software to make sense of a document, that this would be preferable to 
having partially variable headers such as <h1>Fred's Family Web Site : Our 
Holiday</h1>.  (I would, however, consider such a scheme appropriate for content 
of the <title> element in the (X)HTML <head> element.)


2) Use of images (logos) as <h1> content.  A quick check on the XHTML 1.0 strict 
DTD shows that I can use an <img /> element inside <h1>.  If a logo contains 
wording, for example: a company name, provided that the alt attribute matches 
the wording in the picture, is it acceptable to have only that image as my <h1> 
header?  It looks fine on Lynx, but I am uncertain as to how a screen reader 
would interpret this.

3) I have seen extensive use of a logo as link content to a "home" page - far 
more than use of <link rel=""/>.  Whilst I still believe in using <link 
rel=""/>, is it good practice to have an image as a header which is also a link 
to the "home" page of a collection?

Thanks in anticipation...

Cheers

M


-- 
Matthew Smith
Kadina Business Consultancy
South Australia

Received on Tuesday, 11 May 2004 20:20:39 UTC