[whatwg] Re: <section> and headings
Lachlan Hunt
lachlan.hunt at iinet.net.au
Sun Aug 29 08:42:56 PDT 2004
James Graham wrote:
> The semantics of h1...h6 elements that are the first h1...h6 child of a
> <section> element is the heading for that section. Subsequent h1...h6
> elements in the same <section> are subheadings...
>
> When a h1...h6 element is the child of a <section> element, UAs which
> contruct a document outline must do so from the depth of "section"
> nesting alone and ignore which of h1...h6 is used...
This is a conceptually bad idea because it alters the defined semantics
of <hn> elements and combines it with XHTML2-style, structured headings.
Doing this essentially says that h1 to h6 are exactly the same, which
they are not. While I'd support the addition of <section> elements, I
do not support altering the semantics of existing elements. If
<section> were introduced for the purpose of structuring a document,
than an <h> element should also be introduced for the headings. But, I
believe that would not be backwards compatible with IE, as it be
ignored, and unstylable like every other new element when served as
text/html.
If you really want *numbered* heading levels to be determined by their
structure level, I'd prefer it be done using numbered sections, similar
to the numbered divs found in the ISO HTML [1] because at least that
preserves the semantics of the hn elements. But, I also don't think
that's a good idea because it adds too many extra elements, which will
not be understood, nor used correctly by anyone. It may also make
documents more difficult to maintain. So, personally, I think the
semantics of <hn> elements should not be changed, but that doesn't mean
<section> can't be introduced.
> The most obvious use case I have in mind would be a UA hiding certian
> sections of the page so that the content was easilly accessible. It
> might therefore be goood to have a general purpose <chrome> element
I would not support a <chrome> element because that is the term often
used to refer to the application interface styles, and has absolutely
nothing to do with being a sectoin.
> to denote a section of the page other than the main content. One could then
> subdivide using an attribute (<chrome type="header"> <chrome
> type="footer"> and so on).
DO NOT overload the type attribute any more than it already is. We had
this discussion a few months ago when I was paying more attention to
this work, and several people were suggesting the use of type for
various things. The type attrubue *SHOULD* only be used for denothing
the MIME type of a resource, and for form controls. HTML4 already
overloaded the attrbute with 10 different uses; 8 of them being
presentational, and thus deprecated.
>> We'll probably keep it to a minimum though. The idea is just to relieve
>> the most common pseudo-semantic uses of <div>.
>
> Ideally we could get a large sample of actual sites to find out what the
> most common uses acttually are. Is there an existing bot avaliable that
> would allow one to spider (part of!) the web and extract the classnames
> given to <div> elements?
Andy Clarke did a study a few months back on the most common section
ids, to determine what a general site consists of, and published his
results [2 - 4]. Maybe that could help with determining semantics for
new elements.
[1] http://www.cs.tcd.ie/15445/15445.HTML
[2] http://www.stuffandnonsense.co.uk/archives/whats_in_a_name.html
[3] http://www.stuffandnonsense.co.uk/archives/naming_conventions_table.html
[4] http://www.stuffandnonsense.co.uk/archives/whats_in_a_name_pt2.html
--
Lachlan Hunt
http://www.lachy.id.au/
lachlan.hunt at lachy.id.au
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