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From: Eoin Campbell
Date: Feb 18, 2005 4:04AM

In my view, every webpage should have 1 and only 1 H1 element,
reserved for the title of that page.
Section headings within a page should use H2, etc.

Using headings consistently will help all readers, as they will be
styled in the same way, and will help people using screen readers,
because JAWS for example, can extract a list of all the headings in a page
and read them out, including the heading level of each one.
e.g.

Page title 1
Section title 2
2nd section title 2
Subsection title 3


Apart from accessibility issues, search engines attach more weight to
words in headings, and can also grab the heading text rather than the
element text to display in lists of hits. This is important
when you have an internal search engine. You would want an external search engine
like Google to use the title element, which might include a brief indication
of the website (e.g. XMLW - Home page), while your internal
search engine should just display the page title, using the contents of the
H1 element. Therefore consistently using H1 for the title of each page is
important to improve your search engine result presentation.


At 06:51 18/02/2005, Glenda wrote:
>Hopefully this will be a question with a quick, simple answer: if a document
>is over several webpages, does the heading structure follow the document or
>the webpage? In other words, if the second webpage is actually a Heading 3
>section, is ok the first heading on that page is a ? Not a ?
>

--
Eoin Campbell, Technical Director, XML Workshop Ltd.
10 Greenmount Industrial Estate, Harolds Cross, Dublin, Ireland.
Phone: +353 1 4547811; fax: +353 1 4496299.
Email: <EMAIL REMOVED> ; web: www.xmlw.ie
YAWC: One-click web publishing from Word!
YAWC Pro: www.yawcpro.com
YAWC Online: www.yawconline.com



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