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?
I often wonder about the possibility that a page might need more than one H1. I normally think of H1 as the "title" of the document. But, web pages being what they are, sometimes there might be a heading down a page that seems to require as much weight as the initial H1. Technically this should be another document, but sometimes client specs don't tally ;)
Even so, structurally speaking, what about headings in sidebars? If you use H2, H3, or something like that, when you run your page through the nice W3C document structure engine, it looks like your sidebar stuff is specifically related to your content with the H1 (depending on which order you've got your DIVs in, I guess). Should we use H1 for a sidebar, to demarcate it as separate in structural terms from the main content, and style it with CSS? Does this impact any lo-fi visual devices (i.e. H1 default size being too big for these "lesser" page elements)?
I suppose this is where XHTML 2(?) comes in with its SECTION tag, which enables dynamic heading levels. Or does it? Are web pages still seen within the "document" concept, where everything in them is a singular entity - whereas in real terms, we have global page "sections", like sidebars, that aren't necessarily related to our main content in any structural way.
A related area is the use of the TITLE tag. If H1 = "document title", what about TITLE?! I saw someone refer to the TITLE tag as H0, which is neat, except: should H1 contain the same text as TITLE? If not, what's the difference?
Wow, I didn't know I had that many questions! ;)
Gyrus
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