I've been thinking about a post from a few days ago that has been bothering me. The comments in this post highlight the difference between "valid markup" and "structurally-sound markup":
Question: "...you have the headings of these as <h1>s I'm not sure if you should have more than one <h1> a page? is that correct?" Reply: "You can have as many h1's as you want" >From a valid code point of view, this is correct. Your page can be littered with <h1> elements. But what about from a document-structure point of view? For some devices, such as screen readers and search engine robots, well-structured headings are very important. One example is how screen readers access a page. Blind users cannot skim across a page like sighted users, so they need mechanisms that let them skip across the content using audio. Two main methods involve skipping across content using links or headings. When a blind user comes to a page, many screen readers will start by saying something like "This page has 38 links". The blind user can tab through these links until they get to one they want. The same applies to headings. Each heading on the page is ordered by weight and this is significant to the screen reader - and in turn the blind user. If an item is given <h1> weight on the page, there is an assumption that it is very important content, or a major section of content. If there are too many <h1> elements on the page, the heading weight and structure becomes blurred. Outside of the web, this can also be seen in a poorly laid out MSWord documents, for example. An inexperienced user of MSWord will mark-up all headings in bold. However, there is no hierarchy of heading levels so it becomes hard to understand what is a major heading, a subheading or a sub-sub-heading. The page structure may not be clear to someone else who tries to read it. People who use MSWord correctly assign headings using the styled heading levels. They are giving the page semantic meaning and the page structure is clear to anyone who reads it. So, the point of this rave? While using multiple <h1>'s are valid, you should also think about the underlying page structure - and think about how other devices will interpret this structure. There is an online tool at W3C called the "semantic data extractor" (what a fantastic name!) that can be used to test your page for basic heading structure and hierarchy. If you type in a URL you will see a result showing how the pages heading are organised - including their nesting. Very basic output, but worth a look: http://www.w3.org/2003/12/semantic-extractor.html Russ ***************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list & getting help *****************************************************
