RE: Skipping of headings

Thanks all for the responses. Looking through the email responses, I’m getting the notion that it is OK to have skipped heading levels outside the main content area – so I’ll stick to my current plan of having the skipped heading levels mark up.

 

To answer Steve’s question, the main reason I skip heading levels outside the main content area is for inferring the significance of the heading (see ‘Use heading tags appropriately’ section in the Google SEO starter guide <http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en/webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf> ). This is in-line with the HTML specification on heading rankings (http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/sections.html#headings-and-sections). 

 

The other option is to change such heading tags to span tags and style them up to look like headings, but personally I do not want to go down this path, as they are headings and should be marked up as headings.

 

Regards,

Oscar

 

From: chaals@yandex-team.ru [mailto:chaals@yandex-team.ru] 
Sent: Tuesday, October 21, 2014 2:23 AM
To: Steve Faulkner; Oscar Cao
Cc: WAI Interest Group
Subject: Re: Skipping of headings

 

20.10.2014, 15:29, "Steve Faulkner" <faulkner.steve@gmail.com <mailto:faulkner.steve@gmail.com> >:

 

On 20 October 2014 12:57, Oscar Cao <oscar.cao@live.com <mailto:oscar.cao@live.com> > wrote:

However, for SEO and various other reasons, headings outside the “main content area” should be allowed to skip heading levels.

Can you provide details as to why?

 

One obvious reason is to provide site-wide consistency. If you think the navigation section or the site title is a second or 5th level thing, and make them so in the outline of every page they appear, that seems reasonable given the way we have headings in HTML today (which is an unfortunate accident of ancient web history).

 

cheers

 

--

Charles McCathie Nevile - web standards - CTO Office, Yandex
chaals@yandex-team.ru <mailto:chaals@yandex-team.ru>  - - - Find more at http://yandex.com