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Re: Heading order/nesting - was RE: H1 header in iframe

for

From: Susan Grossman
Date: Aug 26, 2010 10:51AM

>> With the exception of the home page, few
>> documents are really about or best described by "site name".

>Well, I knew you would ultimately agree. :-)



Then wouldn't the corporate example (portal applications) be another
exception?

You may be on the big corporate site - but you're within a specific portal
application. Similar L&F, different web application. So H1 is
"Corporation Application" H2 is "Page Title" and H3 starts the
sub-headings?



Susan


On Thu, Aug 26, 2010 at 9:38 AM, Jukka K. Korpela < <EMAIL REMOVED> >wrote:

> Jared Smith wrote:
>
> > Well, the H1 is a first level, main document heading. The HTML spec
> > indicates that a heading "describes the topic of the section it
> > introduces" (http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/global.html#h-7.5.5).
> > As such, making the site name the <h1> is perfectly valid.
>
> You just contradicted yourself, provided that "perfectly valid" means
> "perfectly correct", as I presume. ("Valid" is really a technical term in
> HTML context and should not be used as general appraisal.) The _site_ name
> does not describe the topic of the _document_ (and normally the entire
> document is the section corresponding to <h1>), except possibly on the
> _main_ page.
>
> > With the exception of the home page, few
> > documents are really about or best described by "site name".
>
> Well, I knew you would ultimately agree. :-)
>
> People say that multiple <h1> elements cause trouble in "search engine
> optimization". There might be some truth in this, since if you are a poor
> lonesome search engine, how could you decide which of the two <h1> elements
> is really the document's heading (which should normally be very important
> in
> searches)? This in turn affects accessibility because search engines are
> more and more becoming everyone's user interface to the web. It's easier to
> type "foobar" in a Google search box and find a foobar page and also "the"
> foobar page (assuming "foobar" is a real proper name, e.g. of a product or
> a
> person or a company or a city) than to scan through your bookmarks or try
> to
> guess whether to try foobar.org or foobar.com or foobar.tv. If you disturb
> search engines, you disturb people who try to find your page and have e.g.
> forgotten its URL.
>
> (I'm not saying that multiple <h1> elements is a big issue here. My point
> is
> that using <h1> for site name most probably wins nothing and probably loses
> something.)
>
> >> And since I was taught there can't be an H2 without an H1
> >
> > I hear this being taught, but don't see any strong reason why it must
> > be this way. The spec certainly does not require it. Maybe I'm missing
> > something.
>
> The HTML standard requires it, but I don't think many people take the
> standard seriously or even know about, or would have a reason to. People
> have read so much about W3C recommendations as "standards" that they would
> hardly recognize a real standard...
>
> But it's always been good practice not to skip heading levels, and starting
> with <h2> surely skips the first level. Skipping heading levels is
> typically
> a symptom of using heading markup just to create large font sizes,
> something
> that was common in early 1990 before style sheets or even <font> tags
> became
> available. In fact, <h1>W3C</h1> across all pages of the site almost looks
> like a parody of that, but I'm afraid it isn't.
>
> --
> Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/ <http://www.cs.tut.fi/%7Ejkorpela/>;
>
>