[whatwg] Re: <section> and headings and other threads

[dolphinling]

Ian Hickson wrote:

> On Thu, 25 Nov 2004, dolphinling wrote:
> 
>><section>
>>  <h1>1st level header</h1>
>>  <p>content</p>
>>  <!-- section -->
>>    <!-- section -->
>>      <h3>3rd level header</h3>
>>      <p>content</p>
>>    <!-- /section -->
>>  <!-- /section -->
>></section>
> 
> 
> Disagreed; the <h3> simply gets treated as an <h2> in this case, IMHO. I 
> don't see the advantage of having deeper sections here.

Suppose you have an outline like this:

Section
  |
  +--A
  |  |
  |  +--B
  |  |  |
  |  |  +--C
  |  |  |
  |  |  +--D
  |  |
  |  +--E
  |     |
  |     +--F
  |     |
  |     +--G
  |
  +--H
     |
     +-----I
     |
     +-----J

...where I and J are the same level as C, D, F, and G. If there's no way 
to skip a heading level, then there's no way to convey the fact that 
they're of the same importance.

One real-world example of this that I know of is 
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/nspr/reference/html/, take a look at 
chapter 3. Another example would be in taxonomy, where there are lots 
and lots of sub- and supercategories, but all species should obviously 
be the same heading level.

In the absence of sub/superheadings (which IMO would be a much better 
solution, but possibly wouldn't be able to be backwards-compatible (or 
maybe they would, I haven't thought about it quite enough...)) there 
needs to be some way to skip levels.

-- 
dolphinling
<http://dolphinling.net/>