[html5] <header>, <hgroup> and subheadings

[Micky Hulse]

Hi Jukka! Thanks for the reply, I really appreciate the help. :)

On Thu, May 2, 2013 at 12:59 AM, Jukka K. Korpela
<jukka.k.korpela at kolumbus.fi> wrote:
> There is no HTML5 specification. There are just more or less mutable working
> documents confusingly called "specifications" or "standards". In particular,
> 1) the HTML 5.0 CR by the W3C still has the <hgroup> element:
> http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/
> 2) the editor's draft HTML 5.1 Nightly has it removed now, following the W3C
> working group decision:
> http://www.w3.org/html/wg/drafts/html/master/
> 3) the HTML Living HTML by the WHATWG still has it, with no note about being
> removed:
> http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/

Interesting! It would be nice if HTMLDoctor website had mentioned
those things. I know they are not an official source of information,
but they usually are the first to appear in Google searches for HTML5
topics. I suppose I'll wait to see what they write about in the coming
weeks on this topic. :)

> ... <snip> ...
> Either of these approaches makes the entire heading text a 2nd level heading
> from the perspective of search engines. This should be OK because that's
> what it is, even though some parts thereof might be seen as less important
> than others.

Awesome. Thanks for the pro tips, I really appreciate it. :)

<off-topic>

A few years back (2010-ish), I actually used to do something similar
to what you suggest for sub-headings and headings; unfortunately, we
ended up running into issues with Google News.

Long story short, Google News did not like the extraneous markup
within our primary heading tags on story pages; the fix was to make
the headline "clean" by stripping any child HTML from the heading.

Once we "fixed" our primary headings (and tweaked the page title), our
news stories showed back up in Google News.

Interestingly, standard Google searches had no problems with extra
markup inside the heading tags for our stories.

The point is, Google news is much more strict than regular Google and
that's why I have a tendency to use multiple heading levels for main,
sub and tertiary headlines.

</off-topic>

With that said, I'll play around with your suggested solution(s).

Thanks again for your clarification and help! It's much appreciated!

Cheers,
Micky