Someone else is thinking about headings

Wednesday, January 4, 2006

Measure Map tells me I recieved a few visitors via search results about the correct use of headings. So I'm not alone in being pedantic about the small things. So I used the same searches to find some other sites talking about the topic via Google. Here's what I found.

Here are the search queries Measure Map has captured:

semantic use of headings
xslt h1 nesting h2
correct use of h1
h1 element correct use of

Andy Budd discussed it back in February 2005 in " Heading Elements, Semantics and the Spec". He talks about the improper use of the h1 tag for the site name.

Most web authors are using the H1 element this way in order to increase the meaning of the document. However in many respects they are actually doing the opposite and adding superfluous information
A lot of web authors also mistakenly believe that there should only be a single h1 per page. This makes sense if all the information on the page is about a single subject but it makes less sense if the page has groups of unconnected information.

–Andy Budd: Elements, Semantics and the Spec

Anne van Kesteren brought up the same issue back in 2004.

Some (or most) people think a document is about one subject and that therefore the H1 should cover that. Other people think TITLE is more appropriate for that

–Anne Van Kesteren: More than one H1

And a long discussion follows.

WebAIM talks about how good semantic structure aids accessibility.

Screen reader and other assistive technology users have the ability to navigate Web pages by structure. This means that the user can read or jump directly to top level elements (H1), next level elements (H2), third level elements (H3), and so on. Viewing or listening to this outline should give them a good idea of the contents and structure of the page.

–WebAIM Tutorial: Semantic structure

All of which are pretty similar to what I have been saying.

One new find though was a link from a comment posted on the Andy Budd page to the W3C Semantic Data Extractor. Feed in your URL and it'll attempt to extract some meaningful information from the markup. An interestng look at how an automated process can find meaning in webpage markup.

Found some more blog entries: