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

Thu Mar 31 17:25:39 PST 2005

On Fri, 1 Apr 2005, Matthew Thomas wrote:
> >
> > 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.
> 
> [...]

Note that the difference between <title> and <h1> is not that <title> is 
expected to include author information or whatever.

The example I gave earlier, of a Wikipedia page, shows the difference I 
meant:

   <title>Main Page - Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia</title>
   ...
   <h1>Main Page</h1>

Another example:

   <title>Introduction to the mating rituals of bees</title>
   ...
   <h1>Introduction</h1>

The point is that the <title> has to stand alone and represent the 
document when taken out of context, whereas the <h1> is the header of a 
document _in the context of the page_, i.e. when people already know what 
the basic subject area is.

Thus the <title> is not in any sense the parent of the <h1> or other 
headers.

> It is a bad idea for the meaning of an element to be markedly different 
> from the meaning of its name. That is likely to cause confusion, 
> non-conformance, and disrespect for the spec in general.

While I agree with this in general, and while I am aware of a huge number 
of cases where the HTML language faito follow ls this design principle,I 
don't see its relevance in this particular case.

> Authors have been encouraged to misuse <title> so far for a different 
> reason: the lack of a well-defined standard for presenting the other 
> information they want shown in document summaries. So a better idea 
> would be to explicitly define a very limited number of rel= attributes 
> (as you already plan to do) to contain the non-title data that authors 
> most often put in <title> -- mainly author and publisher -- and perhaps 
> allow the rel= attribute to be placed in elements other than <link> and 
> <a>.

While this sounds like a good idea in principle, I don't see how it 
affects my point (in terms of the examples above).

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