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Re: Multiple H1 tags in an HTML5 web page

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From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Mar 10, 2014 1:29PM

2014-03-10 21:12, Steve Faulkner wrote:

> As i pointed out previously the HTML5 spec strongly encourages using
> headings as per their outline depth.

I'm not sure I have quite followed the discussion, but at
http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/sections.html#the-h1,-h2,-h3,-h4,-h5,-and-h6-elements
the W3C HTML5 CR presents two approaches, one using heading elements by
nesting depth and one using <h1> inside <section>, and adds: "Authors
might prefer the former style for its terseness, or the latter style for
its convenience in the face of heavy editing; which is best is purely an
issue of preferred authoring style." I cannot see this as encourageing,
even mildly, the use of the former approach (which is surely much more
practical).

> It does not encourage authors to use
> H1s to represent anything other than a H1, if that is unclear it is a bug
> and needs to be fixed.

Well, the question is what an H1 is. The old definition is simple and
understandable: it is a 1st level heading in a document. The HTML5
definition is less simple, but consistent as such: it is a 1st level
heading relative to something defined by HTML5

Personally, I don't like this modern style of speaking about "bugs".
Long ago, I learned that a bug was a software error or, more exactly,
failure to work by a specification. A specification, by this definition,
cannot have bugs; it can have inconsistencies or just something that
someone regards as wrong.

In this case, I don't think it's a matter of "bugs" in any useful sense.
People may disagree on what a specification should say. We can debate
over such things, rationally or irrationally, but it is confusing, and
probably an accessibility issue too, to cognitively challenged people at
least, to call differing opinions "bugs".

Yucca