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Re: page should contain no more than two h1 elements

for

From: Korpela Jukka
Date: Jun 16, 2009 12:35AM


>> The page should contain no more than two h1 elements.Warn: 18 h1
> elements
>> were found.
>> The text content of each h1 element should match all or part of the
> title
>> content.Warn: 18 h1 elements do not meet the criteria.
>
> Explanation: This appears to be generated by the Firefox Accessibility
> Toolbar

Thanks, I think this greatly helps us to evaluate that evaluator.

> It is an excellent evaluator tool, and one
> that I use often.

Its other features must then be superb, to compensate for the absurd
warning that has misled people so much (at least many people who have
participated in this discussion).

> However, the 'warings' noted by the tool are somewhat
> subjective, and they represent the opinion of the toolbar creators.

Being subjective is one thing, being absurd is another thing.

In the past, there have been many discussions on whether a document should
have exactly one (or at most one) h1 element. The expert consensus has
been that normally a document should have one first-level heading, but
there are exceptions, such as a bi- or multilingual edition of a document.
(It is almost always best to present each language version as a separate
document, but that's a different issue, and there are exceptions to that
as well, such as scientific purposes and some documents for bilingual
audiences.)

So it would be OK to say that a document should normally have just one h1
element, please check whether this is a justified exception.

But the warning
a) does not refer to any exceptions
b) makes the upper limit arbitrarily _two_ and not one
c) does not seem to refer to any reasons or arguments
d) requires that h1 element content should "match" all or part of title
element content; there is no ground for this justification - the content
might be the same, or somewhat different, or completely different, as long
as both elements serve their purposes.
(For example, the title element content should be understandable even
without any context. There is no such requirement for h1.)

> Originally, multiple H1s were flagged as 'failures',

Oh my.

--
Yucca