[whatwg] Headings and sections, role of H2-H6

Nikita Popov privat at ni-po.com
Fri Apr 30 05:02:43 PDT 2010


I personally prefer using <h1-6> and do not see, why always using <h1> 
may be better.

Furthermore I think that using <h1> in this case is quite irritating. 
The HTML 4.01 standard says the h1-heading to be most important, the 
HTML 5 standard defines it as having the highest rank. It is in my eyes 
unintuitive having only headings of highest rank in a document. (Yes, I 
know, that this isn't quite correct, but from the view of a simple html 
author who doesn't really care about outline algorithms, this is true.) 
What would make much more sense, is to omit the rank fully, so only only 
has to write <h>.
<section>
<h>Rank of this title is to be found using the outline algorithm</h>
<p>Yey, content!</p>
</section>

Furthermore this ensures that one can easily style a document that uses 
both the <section>ed variant and the <hX>-ranked one without having an 
extra selector.

Beyond that, using <h> instead of <h1> would even be more backwards 
compatible to the HTML 4 use of headings.


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