[pmwiki-users] Avoiding Headings in the SideBar

H. Fox haganfox at gmail.com
Thu Aug 11 17:35:57 CDT 2005


On 8/11/05, V.Krishn <mistyfire at autograf.pl> wrote:
> > On Thu, Aug 11, 2005 at 10:11:25AM -0700, H. Fox wrote:
> > > On 8/11/05, Patrick R. Michaud <pmichaud at pobox.com> wrote:
> > I recall reading somewhere that accessibility is improved by limiting
> :-)
> 
> > the use of headings to <h1> through <h3>. However, this might be
> > important only for the main text, and we could decide that higher levels
> > are appropriate for the sidebar.
> >
> > It doesn't matter to me what heading level we choose to use in the
> > sidebar, as long as it's not <h1>. Also, I don't know if we would
> > ever want subheadings in the sidebar, which might argue for using <h5>
> Using <h5> for sidebar seems ok.
> Also if I am not mistaken pmwiki allows till <h6>, we have to see that we have
> some spare left for some miscellaneous stuffs(can't guess of one now). ;-)

If a heading must be used, H5 is good -- much better than H2.

I don't think using headings in the sidebar is appropriate.

This stems from my point of view that
* The sidebar is a site navigation menu and not part of the wikipage
as a semantic document.
* The document structure, as set forth by the headings, is sometimes important.

Basically I think it's a case of the "using headings to create font
effects" in the sidebar.

Ideally headings should be used solely to delineate the structure of
the wikipage.  Even if that isn't the default behavior, it should be
possible -- even encouraged -- to have the wikipage document
machine-parsable (by a search engine, for example) into a "clean"
outline based on the headings.

This illustrates how, currently, PmWiki documents fall short in that respect:

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.pmwiki.org%2Fwiki%2FPmWiki%2FPmWiki&outline=1#outlineresult

(Side note: check out the font size.  Here's the W3C recommendation:
http://www.w3.org/QA/Tips/font-size )

Moving the SideBar to the right (actually, "after the wikitext in the
document") seems to help a little.

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.pmwiki.org%2Fwiki%2FCookbook%2FLightSkin&outline=1#outlineresult

Here's sidebar-on-the-left with H6 headings:

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fqdig.sourceforge.net%2FTips%2FHttpAuthGuide&doctype=Inline&outline=1#outlineresult

Sorry if this is pestering.  I know Pm has rejected this idea previously...

Hagan

ps: Of possible interest:
http://www.w3.org/QA/Tips/Use_h1_for_Title




More information about the pmwiki-users mailing list