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Re: Multiple H1 tags in an HTML5 web page

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From: Duff Johnson
Date: Mar 10, 2014 3:27PM

On Mar 10, 2014, at 4:59 PM, Jared Smith < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
>
> Really what you're asking is, "Do heading levels matter?" I argue that
> they do. And our survey results strongly support this.

Yes! What a given piece of text "deserves" is *not* the issue. Document structure is the issue.

If headings are about "importance" then longer documents in HTML become an impossibility from the accessibility point of view because they are un-navigable, pure and simple.

<H1> is not about winning a popularity contest. It was defined as "importance" in HTML 4, but that was a flat-out error (from the accessibility point of view), one that's explicitly corrected in HTML 5.

I wrote a semi-decent blog post about this in 2012 while I was at NetCentric:

http://www.commonlook.com/The-Definition-of-Heading

Duff.

PS: PDF got this one right from the outset, as the blog-post explains.