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From: Duff Johnson
Date: Aug 20, 2025 9:38AM

A shell from the peanut gallery….

This conversation is always fascinating to me given that it occurs within HTML’s interesting constraints…

- A <title> tag that does NOT enclose page content, only metadata
- No semantic markup for title content, and therefore, no way to distinguish the title from the headings
- Ambiguity regarding whether headings denote structure or importance
- Heading levels limited to 6 (effectively to 5, if h1 is reserved for the page title)

Steve raises some of the cases that have always bothered me about HTML’s fudge-up of headings. Isn’t it crazy that in 2025 there’s still ambiguity about whether headings denote structure vs importance? Or that h1 is forced to serve double-duty as a heading concept AND a titling concept?

In PDF (my world), we more-or-less followed the HTML paradigm for headings from 2001 (when Tagged PDF was introduced) until 2017, with one major difference: headings in PDF signify structure, not importance.

We changed this paradigm with PDF 2.0 (first published in 2017) because the gap between HTML’s approach to structuring content and the reality of the structures found in PDF documents was too big to ignore.

As a result PDF 2.0 added a Title tag to enclose the document's on-page title content, enriching PDF’s semantic structure to allow document titles to be clearly distinguished from document headings, and thus ending the debate (for PDF) about how / when / where H1 was correct. We also allowed heading levels above 6.

Of course, it will take years to move industry as a whole to PDF 2.0, but at least, once folks get there they will find that a document’s structure may be unambiguously determined.

IMHO, HTML could also benefit from a <title> tag inside the <body>. :-)

Duff.



> On Aug 20, 2025, at 06:24, Steve Green via WebAIM-Forum < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
>
> It certainly isn't a hard and fast WCAG rule. If a page contains two entirely unrelated topics, it can and indeed must have two h1 headings if there isn't an overarching heading. For instance, if a page contains multiple news articles, the heading for each one should be h1 if there is no overarching "News" heading. There may not be such a heading because at level AA there is no requirement to have visual headings, although there is at level AAA. If there is a "News" heading, it would be h1 and each news article would be h2.
>
> In my previous email I forgot to mention the way in which WCAG is contradictory. As I said, in most places, it says that the heading levels must reflect the logical structure of the content, which is what almost everyone does. However, in at least one place it says the headings should reflect the importance of the content, which is an entirely different thing. Furthermore, it is subjective because we will not have a shared view of importance. By contrast, we should be able to agree on the logical structure of a page.
>
> Steve
>