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Re: headings

for

From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Feb 21, 2005 8:03AM

On Mon, 21 Feb 2005, michael.brockington wrote:

> > A lot of developers use the H1 as the name of the site, the
> > h2 as the section and so on, which is simply wrong.
>
> On Friday you made the above statement.
> Several people have made a number of assertions in this thread, but I have
> yet to get a direct response to this one simple question,

Which simple question? I see no question. If you mean the question whether
it is correct (from the accessibility perspective, I presume) to use h1 as
the name of the site (irrespectively of the page's content), then the
above statement is a very direct answer to it. If you mean arguments in
favor of that answer, several arguments have been given.

> Jukka made a number of valid points, but
> while his opinions on related issues appear to agree with yours, they did not
> appear to me to address this point.

I cannot see what "this point" means here.

From some other postings in this discussion, I guess you might be looking
for an explicit statement in WAI guidelines against using h1 as site name.
I think the points already made have contained a reference to the
guideline that tells authors to use logical markup according to
specifications. If you want something even more explicit, you are asking
for too much. Besides, we should aim at making pages accessible to people,
not at complying with accessibility principles.

The simple fact that h1 will be presented, by default (and we can never be
sure of being able to override the defaults) in a very prominent manner,
such as slow voice and considerable pause after (or very large font and a
bottom margin), should deter us from using it for anything else than a
first-level heading that describes the _page_ and therefore deserves such
presentation.

--
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/