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Re: page should contain no more than two h1 elements

for

From: Steve Green
Date: Jun 15, 2009 12:25PM

This discussion illustrates that there is not a consensus regarding whether
having a single h1 is 'best practice'. I certainly don't agree that it is.

For instance where do you put content such as the page header and footer,
navigation and other common elements? They clearly don't belong under the h1
that contains your content. Unfortunately the current (X)HTML specifications
do not provide a means to mark up those types of content appropriately.

Also there is nothing anywhere that says a page has to be about a single
topic. Often it will be but not always.

Steve



-----Original Message-----
From: <EMAIL REMOVED>
[mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Simius Puer
Sent: 15 June 2009 19:12
To: WebAIM Discussion List
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] page should contain no more than two h1 elements

Very true, there is nothing in the core HTML specification (or even XHTML
Strict) that says not to do this, but there is a world of difference between
code that validates and that is semantically correct.

I am only guessing here but the original question was probably in response
to the results of an automated accessibility test (especially given that the
WebAIM mailing list is about accessibility). As such *there is an answer* -
semantic markup is required and whilst it might not be a major upset to
those with assistive technologies I am sure that it doesn't help to abuse
mark-up.

In addition to accessibility (the point of this mailing list) there are also
some black-hat SEO techniques use multiple h1 tags to try to promote their
content in search engines. This technique is known and does not receive any
additional weighting in Google, indeed there is specualtion that it may even
reduecontent weighting as it does not follow good guidelines.

So sorry, whilst it might not be against the W3C HTML spec it is against
best practice.