section is more problematic, I think.

Yes, you’re right about h1; I guess I was referring to convention rather than the spec itself.

As for article I think it demonstrates another difficulty with HTML5, namely how to interpret more abstract structural tags. After all, paragraphs, headings etc. are not open to interpretation quite as much. However, I read article as content that could be syndicated externally. Just having a tag that marks up external content would be rather limiting:

The article element represents a component of a page that consists of a self-contained composition in a document, page, application, or site and that is intended [my emphasis] to be independently distributable or reusable, e.g. in syndication. This could be a forum post, a magazine or newspaper article, a blog entry, a user-submitted comment, an interactive widget or gadget, or any other independent item of content. HTML5 Core and Vocabulary

(PS—It would have been nice to have used the mark tag in there, but I don’t think WordPress would parse it).

Regarding using the article tag, it’s only for external content: http://www.w3schools.com/html5/tag_article.asp – did you mean the section tag? I wouldn’t use that in XHTML as it means the document wouldn’t be valid according to my chosen document type. I’ll simply carry on trying to describe content using the minimum number of divs possible.

I’d personally go with article (or even article id="content") as it means more than div id="content". I don’t think it’s the new tags that will cause problems, except for when the spec changes: And that’s not going to change the user’s experience of your page.

I’ve corrected the sentence about how HTML4 handles headings. Thinking about this, I guess people equate the document’s title with h1 and, as a document should logically only have one title, it follows that it should only have one h1. But I appreciate there’s nothing in the spec about this usage of h1, or how many h1s you can place in a document.

Document authors will have to choose which heading scheme they follow. As long as it’s one or the other HTML5 shouldn’t cause more bad structures. If I was being really optimistic I might even argue that it’ll get authors thinking about structure, especially as they’re not simply wrapping content up in divs all the time.

I take your point about screen readers’ adoption of HTML specs. I guess a href="#content" will be with us for some time.

Use only H1, H1 frigging everywhere

Yes, this feels plain odd; I’m going to list a few of the problems I’ve had with HTML5; this is one of them.

Once again, thanks for your comment.

Thanks for the read.

First, i’m not sure where you got the idea that HTML4 says you can’t have a bazillion H1 elements in your document. It doesn’t. It doesn’t require that you use one, or just one, or twelve, or anything. The “one H1 per page” rule is actually not a rule, and comes from SEO (and even from a SEO perspective, it’s kinda wrong).

Then, what you write about screen readers is true. The logic of section headings in HTML5 borrows from XHTML2 (hey, looks like it’s not totally dead after all), where the structure of sectioning elements determine the “real” level of a heading. XHTML2 had just a H element (no number), but HTML5 is keeping H1-H2 for backwards compatibility. So in the end the spec advises two different options for writing good document outlines:

1. Use only H1, H1 frigging everywhere, and SECTION and other sectioning elements (hum, ARTICLE, BLOCKQUOTE, a few others) for specifying the level of the title and relevant content in the outline. Aka XHTML2-style.
2. Use H1-H6, ignoring sectioning elements. Aka HTML4-style.

All this is nice, but i suspect we’re in for some major wreckage, as:

- Authors already have trouble getting their HTML4-style headings correctly. HTML5 is bound to confuse them, especially with two ways of doing things. I predict we will continue to see pages with bad outlines, and may see even more of them in the future.
- Screen reader publishers are awfully slow sometimes to support basic stuff like, hum, HTML4. Don’t hold your breath while they don’t update their software to cope with HTML5 sections/outlines better. Oh, and if authors start using HTML5 but mess up their outlines, there won’t be much of an incentive to support proper outlining algorithms.

This is going to be fun. :)