[thelist] A question of semantics and tags

[Julian Rickards]

My approach has been the following. I think you could say that every page
has a single purpose whether it be describing the company, providing contact
information, giving detailed information about a particular product and so
on. This purpose should be encapsulated in the H1 and therefore, since there
can't be two or more purposes for a page, there can be only one H1. If you
can think of more than one purpose for the page, either you have too much
conflicting information on the page or you haven't properly summarized the
content of the page. For example, if you are providing detail about a
particular bike your site is selling and also the page is providing contact
information for your company, then the information is conflicting and should
be split into two pages. However, if you are providing both a staff
directory and driving directions to the company, then the H1 should
encapsulate these and H2s should be used to split them.
The only page that can be difficult is the home page of a site. Sometimes
the page is constantly changing, possibly because the products on sale
change from day to day or week to week. Sometimes the home page is really a
gateway to the various sections on the site. I might agree that the only
constant on this type of page is the business name and would concede that
marking up the business name and slogan with H1 and H2 would be acceptable.

Just my 2 cents,

Jules
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E-mail: julian dot rickards at gmail dot com