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Re: Multiple H1 tags in an HTML5 web page

for

From: Chagnon | PubCom
Date: Mar 10, 2014 2:02PM

"you can use a properly-leveled heading structure that always has and always
will work."

Interesting discussion, but there's one factor that yet hasn't been
mentioned.

What kind of document are you discussing? An entire webpage? One story on a
webpage? A Word document? A magazine? Or what?

If this is a webpage with multiple stories on it, like a portal webpage for
a newspaper, our testers have requested that each story get its own H1 tag.
The stories are independent from each other on different unrelated topics.
They have nothing in common other than that they are news at that point in
time. In an hour, the webpage's structure will change.

If this is a document (Word or PDF) with sidebars, or a webpage with
sidebars, sometimes it's not so easy to wrangle everything into a strict
hierarchical heading structure. Some sidebars are directly related to the
main story, so they're pretty easy to fit into the structure as <H2> or
<H3>. But other sidebars are not so clearly related to the main story.

What if the sidebar is only remotely related to the main story? An <H2> tag
gives the connotation that it's more directly related than it really is. Or
what if the publisher just wants to include another topic on the page, as in
"if you're reading Topic A, then you might be interested in Topic X in this
sidebar." Tagging it as part of the main hierarchy could be incorrect.

Most webpages and many document pages (like brochures, magazines, and
newspapers) have so many different pieces of content on them that don't fit
the hierarchy.

How do you propose handling heading structure and hierarchy in these common,
but complex, situations?

-Bevi Chagnon
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