[whatwg] <h1> to <h6> in <body>

Thu Mar 31 04:35:49 PST 2005

On Fri, 1 Apr 2005, Matthew Thomas wrote:
>
> First, I don't understand why section 2.4 of the Web Apps spec exists -- 
> or sections 2.3, 2.5, 2.6.2, or 2.7. None of these seem to have nothing 
> to do with "eas[ing] the authoring of Web-based applications", or even 
> anything to do with Web-based applications at all. They would make more 
> sense in a separate HTML Semantic Redefinitions spec.

For various technical and political reasons, Web Apps 1.0 has basically 
become HTML5. For other reasons, mainly political, I haven't updated the 
title of the spec, the abtract, or the requirements to reflect this yet.

Apologies for not making this clear.

> Ian Hickson wrote:
> > On Wed, 30 Mar 2005, Brad Fults wrote:
> > >
> > > Firstly, I don't think a paragraph preceding a section header should 
> > > be associated with that section. For instance, if one puts a 
> > > commentary before a book (and thus before Chapter 1), the commentary 
> > > isn't meant to be part of Chapter 1.
> >
> > So what would it be associated with?
> 
> The document as a whole.

Fair enough.

> > (And wouldn't the first header in a book be the book's title, which it 
> > _would_ make sense for the paragraph to be associated with?)
> 
> The first header, sure, but that wouldn't be an <h1>, that would be a 
> <title>. If you're putting an entire book in one HTML file, you're not 
> optimizing for Web access, so you can use <title> for the actual title 
> rather than for a context-independent title+description+publisher 
> mishmash.

I strongly feel that the <title> element is _not_ a level above the first 
<h1>. The <title> is metadata, a context-free label to be used to describe 
the page elsewhere. The (first) <h1> is the main header for the document.

I intend to explicitly state this in the spec.

> > I'm concerned that if we imply a section before the first header, a 
> > lot of documents are going to end up with implied first sections that 
> > will look silly in outliners.
> 
> Some outliners have root elements, some don't. Some outliners don't even 
> allow sections at all, just bulleted/numbered items. I don't know why 
> you're trying to design for one particular kind of outliner.

I'm not trying to design "for" a particular kind of outliner. I'm trying 
to design the canonical outline of an HTML document. How UAs _present_ 
this outline (e.g. by only showing the top level, or showing all the 
headers at the same level but with multi-level numbering, or whatever) is 
a totally separate issue.

There is a big difference between what you propose (associate lead text 
with the document) and what I was countering here (associate lead text 
with an implied section with no title). Associating lead text with the 
document seems fine to me.

> > A lot of documents have things before their main header, if only 
> > advertising, introductory paragraphs, or the like.
> 
> Which certainly don't belong to the first chapter.

But they do belong to the document, which is what the first header is a 
heading for.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'