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Comment by quotemstr | Hacker News Reader

It's a shame that the outline algorithm didn't succeed. Why shouldn't we be able to compose content from different sources arbitrarily? Why shouldn't I be able to write an <h1> fragment and have it mean "top-level heading OF MY CONTEXT" instead of making an assertion about global document context that I can't control?

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While I agree on hierarchical headings, I don't think H1...H6 are the right tools. These represent absolute levels, we would need a means to express "level+1". I think a H tag with no digit would better convey the meaning "heading of the right level as defined by the surrounding SECTION tags".

But they don't have to represent absolute levels. They could just as easily have represented relative levels, with h2 in a doubly nested section to describe the level today expressed as h4. Dependent on your usecase, this could either be very useful or just mess up your styles a lot.

Well I totally agree with you but we don’t have that. h1 was that, but not anymore.

It’s a shame that we basically can’t rely on default styling to structure a simple document .

There are tons of moments in my life and in my career where I wanted to "just publish" some web page with content while not really caring for aesthetics. But even if you write semantically correct HTML without styling, what you get is not neutral and coherent as it should be, on the contrary, it’s all over the place and inconsistent.

XHTML2 had some good ideas.

There's a new proposal to address this: https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/5033

The outline algorithm didn't succeed because it was too complicated and hard to understand for the common case.

You can define your own styles and have a similar behaviour.

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