Birmingham Web Designer Jeremy Flint blogs here. He works for Kinetic Communications. He organizes events and programs for IPSA. He takes pictures and posts them on Flickr. He also blogs about Hiking and Mississippi State Sports when he has the time. He recommends Dreamhost for all your hosting needs. Make sure you grab the RSS Feed.

There is a great discussion going on over at Tomas Jogin’s site about the proper way to structure the headings in an HTML document. He brings up the point that using an H1 for the name of the Web site could be seen as redundant since it is already (in most cases) in the title element.

Another point he brings up is the use of H1-H6 being used in the side column (guilty as charged here). If the headings are used improperly, the site outline that is generated by the W3C validator can make things look a little strange. It can give the false impression that some items are sub-items, when they are not intended to be that way.

I have always used H1 as the title of the page. Even though the name of the site is in the title element, does the title element always get presented (say, for instance, in text-to-speech utilities)? When I look at my site without stylesheets applied, or in Lynx, the structure makes sense. When I look at my site outline on the validator, it seems to make sense as well.

The only thing that could really stand a good fixing is to remove the H3 that I use to markup my date stamp for each post. It should really be a paragraph instead.

At any rate, make sure you check out the ongoing discussion and put your two cents in.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 21st, 2004 at July 21,2004 @ 8:06 am and is filed under Linkage. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.