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

for

From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Aug 26, 2010 12:03PM

Jared Smith wrote:

> On Thu, Aug 26, 2010 at 10:38 AM, Jukka K. Korpela wrote:
>
>>>> 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
>
> Does it?

Yes it does:
"An <H2> element shall be preceded by an <H1> element."
http://www.scss.tcd.ie/misc/15445/15445.html
That's technically just a comment in the DTD, but it is effectively
normative, since the DTD otherwise contains (complicated) rules that impose
this restriction. This is explained in the "User's Guide" to the standard:
http://www.scss.tcd.ie/misc/15445/UG.HTML#H1
(it's just very tough reading, not virtually incomprehensible like the
standard texts themselves :-)).

> Like I said, I may be missing something, but I do not see
> anything in any HTML standard that requires an <h1> before any <h2>.

There is only one HTML standard, and as I wrote, most people don't know
about and need not know about it. But it's the standard, whereas HTML 4.01
specification is just "W3C recommendation" - issued by an industry
consortium, not a standards body, and written as a fairly loose technical
spec, not with the exactness and style of standards.

--
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/