[whatwg] <h1> to <h6> in <body>
Ian Hickson
ian at hixie.ch
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. `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
More information about the whatwg
mailing list