[whatwg] Outline Depth Does Not Correspond to Sectioning Depth?

Mon Mar 26 17:02:16 PDT 2012

I am confused by the current definition of outline depth (
http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/sections.html#outline-depth),
which, if I understand it correctly, states that the depth resets with each
sub-outline.

So, in the following:

<body>
  <h1>Document Title</h1>
  <section>
    <h2>Section Title</h2>
    <section>
      <h3>Subsection Title</h3>
    </section>
  </section>
</body>

…each heading would have an outline depth of 1, yet for:

<body>
  <h1>Document Title</h1>
  <h2>Section Title</h2>
  <h3>Subsection Title</h3>
</body>

…which is, according to the spec, semantically identical to the previous
example, each heading would instead have an outline depth of 1, 2, and 3
respectively.

At least, that is how this implementation (
https://github.com/hoyois/html5outliner) behaves; I raised this issue with
the implementor and he seems to think it is the correct behavior—if so,
why? Wouldn't it make more sense to have the depths be 1, 2, and 3, whether
explicit sections are used or not?