[whatwg] Headings and sections, role of H2-H6

Boris Zbarsky bzbarsky at MIT.EDU
Fri Apr 30 19:02:03 PDT 2010


On 4/30/10 2:08 PM, Nikita Popov wrote:
> I don't know whether I would be happy, if all headings in my document
> were shown *BIG*, 'cause I use h1 everywhere. I would much more
> appreciate them to be unstyled. (But this is only personal opinion.)

Really?  Given:

   <h>This is a header</h>
   This is some text after the header.

The "unstyled" rendering you would see is:

   This is a headerThis is some text after the header.

If the <h> is followed by a block you're better off, of course, but the 
common case from what I've seen is to just have something like the above.

> As said above, I think it increases backwards compatibility by omitting
> all styles. But it depends on the case whether it's better to have only
> big titles or only unstyled titles.

The latter wouldn't look like titles at all, right?

> I easily think that using h1 everywhere isn't semantically correct.
> Especially if the subsections (with their h1s) cannot be redistributed
> solely it does not make any sense.

I'm not sure I follow.

> But maybe you are right. The html5 spec is already blown up with stuff
> nobody will ever use (keygen?) enough.

Amusingly enough, keygen is something I use once a year or so (when my 
user certificate expires), and something that MIT students need to use 
to, say, register for classes (or view their grades, deal with bursar's 
office stuff online, etc, etc).  See https://ca.mit.edu/ca/certgen 
(though that will likely require a login... that you may not have).  See 
http://ist.mit.edu/services/certificates for the various documentation.

-Boris


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