Drew, I endorse the single h1 per page particularly because each page is judged on its own when sought for relevancy in the search engines. That's from where the majority of fresh users hit a site, based on search criteria.
Though others may argue that we shouldn't construct with a view to SEO, I might suggest they're the retrieval mechanisms of the Web therefore they must be given due consideration when discussing page constructs. Headings are enormously important (as you are aware) not simply for structure but archival and retrieval purposes. Mike Pepper -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Trusz, Andrew Sent: 07 July 2004 12:48 To: '[EMAIL PROTECTED]' Subject: RE: [WSG]headers Lee wrote: There are more than W3C standards. While the W3C standards are great, they leave too much to interpretation. Hence the problem that arises here. Please explain why you might think a couple of sentences qualifies to be under it's own sectional heading. I'd really be interested in learning the thought process there. Two sentences do not qualify for a sectional heading in a book; why would they in a web page?[/quote] **************************************************** Lee, please forgive my bundling a few responses and loading them all into a reply to your response. I couldn't agree more. The standards leave a great deal of room for interpretation as we see here. And I believe we agree substantially on the interpretations as well. But there are differences which I believe show the breadth of the standards. We come at this, I believe, from different perspectives. You are in effect an insider. Your work on the WCAG standards (and thank you for doing it) gives you a perspective I don't have. I'm just trying to figure out what the html 4.01, xhtml 1.0, and css 2.1 standards mean based on what I see in the documents (with a valuable assist from an older WestCiv document on css). So when I see "some people" it means just that and when the specs are vague I take it to mean there is latitude in their application. I don't have insider knowledge so I have to go with what the document says. Hence while to me, hierarchical ordering makes sense, I can see no reason to say it must be followed, other than starting with h1, in order to be technically correct. Put another way, if the standards body means go sequentially from 1 to 6 then they say it. And if they mean a separate h1 for each page they had better say that too because that isn't what is written in the spec documents. So if you all meant something else, clarify in the document or live with what you did say. Hence I think Mike Foskett has his headers technically correct. To him the site is the main point of it all and is an h1 on every page because (and here I admit to putting words in his mouth) each page is a section of the site. He follows that with a page level h1, again something that is the focus of that page. And further with a navigation heading and subheadings. All seem technically to meet the standard set by the w3c. Could you do it hierarchically? Yes. Make the page content h1, navigation having it's own h2 and h3 etc substructure, use h2 and more in the content as appropriate. So Mike Pepper is technically correct as well. Personally I don't like the one h1 per page technique but I do like the idea of actually getting to use an h6 (with font size styled much larger) legitimately. And both ways would make sense if you extracted the headings. Mike Foskett's table of contents would have a lot of references to the site name. But then if you open many books you'll see the book title and either the author's name or the chapter at the top of each page. Mike Pepper's version would be tidier lacking all the site references. But it might also been seen as less cohesive since there would be no obvious connection between content sections. But then book comparisons while useful are not exact when it comes to web sites. What we have then is variety. Which of course is the sine qua non of the web. TIMTOWTDI within standards. And for the intellectual fun of it, try this: h1 Fire? P Hot? Interrogative and exclamatory sentences. Each one word in length. drew ***************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list & getting help ***************************************************** ***************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list & getting help *****************************************************
