Comment by 0xfffafaCrash

5 days ago

moreover h* is just broken whenever dealing with more dynamic content — it simply can’t reasonably be made to work according to accessibility recommendations — and the accessibility guidelines around never skipping a level themselves are ridiculous given the practical reality that dynamic content exists and we have only h1, h2, etc. to work with — the readers and specs are what need to adapt here, not the entire internet

there should really be one header tag and its level should be based on some nesting depth

and don’t get me started on the maintainability mess that is z-index… better we have a system to centrally maintain an ordering list than a distributed one which only works reasonably consistently if you already know everything in the whole system

5 comments

0xfffafaCrash

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webstrand  5 days ago

I like how z-index works, currently. And though I agree with the article, it should apply to all elements by default, I'm not sure how you'd do stacking differently in a way that'd work any better than the current situation?

You can't do away with stacking contexts, you need those to isolate content you don't control to prevent it from breaking the stacking order of content you do control.

I completely agree with you about h* tags, though. I wish html5 sectioning hadn't been killed by the browser vendors. As is there's no safe way to put headings inside custom elements. We almost had it, it was specified and everything.

nfw2  5 days ago

The problem with trying determine heading depth automatically is the depth is not something that can be deduced just by the structure. If headings are siblings, for example, the may be on the same level semantically or not.

One way I've dealt with this in react is combine a Heading component with ContentGroup component. Each content group needs exactly one heading, and heading can't exist without it. Content group can contain other content groups. The tag for heading can then be determined by how many content groups are in the tree above it.

This works pretty well ime, but it can be hard to get devs to use (or think about accessibility at all).

  • wongarsu  4 days ago

    That's how html should have been designed from the start. HTML is originally designed as a very flat hierarchy, e.g. h1 p p p h2 p p h2 p p h3 p h2 p just following each other. When really it would make much more sense to have h{p p p h{p p} h{p p h{p}} h{p}}.

    • yiiii  4 days ago

      That's what sectioning elements [1] like <section> and <article> where once introduced.Opposite to just using <div> elements their purpose was to create a real document outline, where it would have been possible to only use <h1> and their level would be determined by how deep the section is nested, but this approach was never really adapted.

      [1] https://www.w3schools.com/html/html5_semantic_elements.asp