[pmwiki-users] Avoiding Headings in the SideBar

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Thu, Aug 11, 2005 at 06:22:58PM -0700, H. Fox wrote:
> 
> If you think the sidebar is part of the document, then why don't you
> include the sidebar in your print output?  You don't, do you?  That's
> because the SideBar isn't properly a part of the wikipage document --
> it's for site navigation.

On the other hand, show me a web usability expert who believes
that site navigation isn't an important component for nearly
every page on a site.  :-) :-)  

The fact that we don't include navigation elements in the print output 
could be argued to be a characteristic of the output medium (paper 
isn't very interactive), and not as an intrinsic statement that
navigation is somehow separate from a document.  

But your point is very well taken.

> What I'm trying to get across is: Using headings in the SideBar is
> misleading to tools that take advantage of heading structure of pages
> for various purposes.  

Speaking from a semantic perspective, it seems to me that the
sidebar is an important part of the page, the sidebar has sections, 
and that the way we introduce sections is by using heading elements 
<h1>, <h2>, ..., <h6>.  (See the HTML4 specification.)  So, 
choosing a tag besides <h1>...<h6> to introduce the sidebar's
sections is also "wrong" in some sense.

At any rate, I certainly didn't choose <h1> in the sidebar "to
create font effects" -- I could've come up with any number of
other ways to do that.  I used a heading tag because that's 
what the text is -- a heading.

Perhaps if we followed all of the experts' recommendations we'd
up with something like

    <h1> Page Title </h1>
      <div class='text'>
      <h2>Document text</h2>
        <h3>Document subheading</h3>
        <h3>Document subheading</h3>
      </div>
      <div class='sidebar'>
      <h2>Sidebar</h2>
        <h3>Sidebar subheading</h3>
        <h3>Sidebar subheading</h3>
      </div>

which preserves the outline form but also properly designates all
of the various headings.  Unfortunately, in a dynamic editing
environment like PmWiki I can't easily get a structure like the
above to conform to the layout and styling that I want.

> It would be better to achieve the same
> appearance with, say
>    * pmwiki.org
>    ** Cookbook
>    **  Skins
>    **  PITS (bugs, development)
>    **  Mailing Lists

I'm not opposed to doing this, although I think it's equally
wrong to be using an unordered list for something that is
really a section heading of sorts.

> http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.pmwiki.org%2Fwiki%2FPmWiki%2FDocumentationIndex&outline=1#outlineresult
> 
> Does that one look right to you?  

I switched the sidebar on pmwiki.org to use <h5>'s instead
of <h1>'s to see what it would look like.  It still doesn't
look right (the <h2> headings are outdented beyond the margin),
but to me that's a shortcoming of the "outline result" tool
more than the document structure.  The outline tool should
recognize that <h5> is lower significance than <h2>; the fact
that it doesn't makes me feel that W3C is trying to use
this tool to coerce all documents into a *particular* logical
document structure (as if there is only one logical way to
structure a document).  The statement that immediately
follows the outline view belies the truth...

   "Headings should reflect the logical structure of the
    document; they should not be used to simply add
    emphasis, or to change the font size."

In the case of the sidebar, we *are* using headings to
reflect the logical structure of the document.  W3C just
doesn't seem to conceive of a notion that navigation
can be an intrinsic part of a web page, or that a page
could contain subsections with headings that fall outside
of the main document outline hierarchy.  In the real world,
I know of many magazines and textbooks that use sidebars
and callouts that have their own heading structure, but
in the W3C view of the world such things do not exist
(or are semantically "wrong").

At any rate, I think a tool that analyzes a document
for structure ought to be able to figure out that
<h5> headings are not more important than <h2> headings,
regardless of the sequence in which they occur, and shouldn't
be stymied by the fact that a document may have valid structural
reasons to skip heading levels now and then.

None of what I've written here should be taken as an
indication of what choice I think we should ultimately make;
it's just to note that there are several places where I think W3C
adopts an idealized view of the world and doesn't account for
the limitations of that idealized view or the possibility 
of other equally valid views.

Pm