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Comment by robby1066 | Hacker News Reader

First I've ever heard of hgroup.

Subheadings are one of those little things I've wondered about the proper semantics for a million times and always end up doing something slightly different on the fly.

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PicoCSS uses them well, as an example: https://picocss.com/docs/typography#heading-group

> First I've ever heard of hgroup.

<hgroup> was officially added to the HTML spec in 2018 [1]

It was deprecated in the W3C spec but not from the WHATWG spec, before they were merged.

[1]: https://html.spec.whatwg.org/#the-hgroup-element

hgroup is considered deprecated in HTML5 though, whatever that actually means.

It means if you use it then it’ll work fine but younger people will frown at you.

unlike the <blink> tag where younger people will just stare at you in a creepy extended unblinking gaze. it would be so much more satisfying if it still made them blink.

I absolutely need to write a polyfill for that.

   blink {
     animation: 1s ease infinite blink_effect;
   }

   @keyframes blink_effect {
     0% {
       opacity: 0;
     }
     50% {
       opacity: 1;
     }
     100% {
       opacity: 0;
     }
   }

Is it? I don't see any such warning or notice on https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/hg.... It's still listed here: https://www.w3.org/TR/2011/WD-html5-20110405/sections.html#t....

Perhaps it was re-added?

Hmmm you are right! This discussion explains that a bit https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15808330/hgroup-element-... looks like it was going to be removed, but WHATWG ended up keeping it.

> hgroup is considered deprecated in HTML5 though, whatever that actually means.

It was only deprecated in the W3C specification, not the WHATWG specification.

But now it's back in good standing: https://www.tpgi.com/subheadings-subtitles-alternative-title...

Worse, it has changed content rules and semantics in backward-incompatible ways. Meaning there are pages out there that used to be valid, but aren't anymore. And since HTML spills to EPub specs, I recall there were EPubs or EPub spec examples/test suites themselves having to change specifically, epubcheck being actually used for validation and hence directly noting this backward incompatibility.

In a nutshell, hgroup was originally criticized and rejected when W3C was still redacting HTML specs received from the loose group of browser devs and other people calling themselves "WHAT working group" because it paired headings of multiple ranks in a way that confused assistive technologies in browsers. But the first (and at the same time the last;) W3C HTML recommenndation created as unredacted WHAT WG spec snapshot under the W3C/WHATWG "memorandum of understanding" actually smuggled hgroup in. Then Steve Faulkner removed HTML outlining and the whole concept of sectioning roots that was part of Ian Hickson's vision of "HTML 5" for the longest time, but W3C never actually started a new recommendation process afterwards, and the charter for the HTML WG at W3C, Inc. has ended last year. See details at [1].

Arguably, with this change in 2023, we're now post-HTML5. But don't tell the people believing in a single "HTML 5 standard".

[1]: https://sgmljs.net/blog/blog2303.html

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