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RE: Header tag

for

From: Alastair Campbell
Date: May 1, 2003 7:16AM

Thanks for the comments everyone, I hadn't realised this was such a
controversial issue! I'm afraid this is a fairly long post, since I'm
replying to several people.

Simon Wrote:
> If 'sub-sections' are required, then the documents should be further
> sub-divided into sections, with each section having its own
> page instead.

I appreciate Simon's recommendation about chunking up pages, but I
believe there are times when a (fairly) long document is necessary &
desirable, and appropriate mark-up should help people navigate that
document.

The type of case I had in mind was a set of (racing) rules, which in use
will often be printed out, but should be a good (XHTML) web document to.

I'm a little sceptical about marking up large portions of the page as a
list. What is the point of headings and paragraphs then? Whether or not
it closely follows a book metaphor, it should provide a mechanism for
valid nesting. I can see Simon's point about lists when the context is
blog entries, but not for a document with sections and sub-sections.

The WAI isn't particularly clear what the rule on nested headings is, so
I couldn't blame Bobby's makers for not being 100% on it.
"Use header elements to convey document structure and use them according
to specification." - does anyone know where to find the details on the
nesting of headings?
HTML 4 doesn't seem to:
http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/global.html#h-7.5.5

Perhaps it is just a matter of the logic applied in the Bobby test?
Bobby seems to check that each heading is the same number or one higher
than the previous one.

I would suggest that is should be:
Each heading should only be allowed to increment by 0 or 1 compared to
the previous heading, but is allowed to decrement by any number.
I hope that made sense, I'm not a mathematician or programmer!

Does anyone use heading browsing, for example in Jaws? Does it make it
more confusing to have nested headings?

I guess that it would make *more* semantic sense if these things were
actually nested, as the section tag in XHTML 2 implies, or as Patrick
suggested with div tags. However, the headings are there for current
user agents to use in many documents on the web.

Last point to Simon: Although I also use Bobby regularly, some of the
checks are not as useful as they were. For example, your page would get
a 'triple a' rating apart from two things, one of them being "Separate
adjacent links with more than whitespace."

I remember reading that no currently used user-agent has a problem with
links not separated by non-link characters. Yet we still have to deal
with this to pass a test that the general public uses (without an
advanced level of accessibility knowledge).

I could be wrong about the whitespace checkpoint (I can't find the
reference at the moment) but that and the nested headings checkpoint
seem to cause more hassle than benefit.

-Alastair



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