H1 and hierarchy

There have been a couple of minor changes to this blog. You prob­ably will not even noticed them, they are changes under the hood. Again they where the res­ult of I should prac­tise what I preach.

I was dis­cuss­ing hier­arch­ical doc­u­ment struc­ture and the use of head­ing tags over at Port:80 with Andrew Tet­law aka atelaw. I am of the opin­ion that each page should have a single h1 tag which reflects the pur­pose of the page (ie the title) and doc­u­ment struc­ture should be hier­arch­ical from there. Nav­ig­a­tion should not nor­mally be part of the doc­u­ment struc­ture and there­fore not be con­tained in head­ing tags. The obvi­ous excep­tions are nav­ig­a­tion pages, such as a homepage or an archive page.

A passing com­ment was made about blogs, and I defen­ded it with the typ­ical “it is a blog­ging engine, most people just use whatever came out the box”. This site uses a mod­i­fied ver­sion of the default Word­Press tem­plate, which has the blog name as the h1 on each page and what I con­sider h1 qual­ity con­tent given a h2 tag. So ten minutes chan­ging the tem­plates and now, the blog name is no longer in head­ing tags, the most import­ant inform­a­tion on each page in h1 tag. Am I right and the tem­plate designer wrong. in my eyes yes, the most import­ant inform­a­tion on a page is what you got to say not who is say­ing it and the inform­a­tion is bet­ter struc­tured as a res­ult of the changes.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 7th, 2005 at 10:38 pm and is filed under css and html, wordpress . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.