HTML headings article

[Spartanicus]

I wrote an article on HTML headings:
http://codewallop.110mb.com/goodprac...adingology.htm

--
Spartanicus

[Jukka K. Korpela]

Scripsit Ben C:

>The HTML heading elements express a nesting structure. This doesn't
depend on what I think. I would not have designed a markup language
that way, but I can live with other people's design.

Are you sure? The HTML specification says,

"There are six levels of headings in HTML with H1 as the most
important and H6 as the least. Visual browsers usually render more
important headings in larger fonts than less important ones."

D'Oh! I was sure that nobody would pick up that unfortunate sloppy wording,
but I forgot this is c.i.w.a.h. where many people actually check things out
and are clever.

The wording, taken literally, is absurd. The importance of headings varies
in many ways. If you have a document that describes, say, agriculture in
different countries, with country names as natural headings, the
"importance " principle would imply that headings from h1 to h6 should be
used depending on the importance of agriculture in each country, from
<h1>USA</h1down to <h6>Vatican</h6>.

So it is logical to assume that they meant something different. They just
expressed it poorly. The good old HTML 2.0 specification, a great
improvement over its successors in clarity, says:

The six heading elements, <H1through <H6>, denote section headings.
Although the order and occurrence of headings is not constrained by
the HTML DTD, documents should not skip levels (for example, from H1
to H3) - -.

--
Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

[Jukka K. Korpela]

Scripsit Mark Goodge:

Or consider a tourist guide to various towns and cities:

Level 1 - name of region
Level 2 - name of city
Level 3 - subdivision of city
Level 4 - individual tourist attraction

Small towns and cities probably won't need subdividing. You can fit
all the attractions in my howetown on to one page! But if the city is
London or Berlin, then subdividing by map sector makes sense.

OK, it seems that I have to surrender. That's a good example, and so is the
other one, and Toby's example. What they share is an overall hierarchy, with
some branches going deeper than others, together with some lowest-level
headings, though conceivably e.g. the individual tourist attraction
descriptions themselves could have internal structure that requires
lower-level headings.

So can we conclude that heading levels _should not_ be skipped, in an
RFC'ish sense, i.e. they normally must not be skipped but they may be
skipped in exceptional situations after due consideration of the situation,
the needs and implications?

--
Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

[Mark Goodge]

On Thu, 12 Apr 2007 22:16:05 +0300, Jukka K. Korpela put finger to
keyboard and typed:

>Scripsit Mark Goodge:

>Or consider a tourist guide to various towns and cities:

Level 1 - name of region
Level 2 - name of city
Level 3 - subdivision of city
Level 4 - individual tourist attraction

Small towns and cities probably won't need subdividing. You can fit
all the attractions in my howetown on to one page! But if the city is
London or Berlin, then subdividing by map sector makes sense.

OK, it seems that I have to surrender.

That's a very refreshing response, for Usenet :-)

That's a good example, and so is the
other one, and Toby's example. What they share is an overall hierarchy, with
some branches going deeper than others, together with some lowest-level
headings, though conceivably e.g. the individual tourist attraction
descriptions themselves could have internal structure that requires
lower-level headings.

So can we conclude that heading levels _should not_ be skipped, in an
RFC'ish sense, i.e. they normally must not be skipped but they may be
skipped in exceptional situations after due consideration of the situation,
the needs and implications?

I wouldn't put it quite that strongly. I'd argue that heading levels
should be followed, *unless* the structure of the data is better
presented otherwise. That is, the default is to follow the levels, but
it doesn't necessarily have to be "exceptiona l" not to.

Mark
--
Blog: http://mark.goodge.co.uk Photos: http://www.goodge.co.uk
"Every whisper, every waking hour"