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Comment by TZubiri | Hacker News Reader

I always thought the headers in html were kind of dumb. I always think of book sections as:

  <section name="Mammals"> Mammals are blabla </section>

  <section name="Reptiles"> Reptiles are blabla </section>

</section>

</section>

</section>

In this case Animals, Plants and Minerals would be h1, and Mammals and Reptiles would be h2. If you truly wanted to separate representation from content you would do that, as it is you are not really doing that, the h1 and h2 would be creating some kind of explicit open and close tags and hierarchy in a format different than the rest of html.

If someone goes back in time could you kick that Berner's Lee on your way back from killing hitler, correcting the sign on electricity? Thanks. Also send a message to Douglas Crockford if you've got time.

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I dunno about this. Attributes are supposed to be metadata, not displayed textual content. Like it's fine to give the anchor for a section as an attr:

    <section id="animals">
      <h2>Animals</h2>
      <p>Here are my animal facts</p>
    </section>

I would feel strange if a browser's built in CSS were reaching into an element's attribute and rendering the text therein as something visible to the reader.

I don't think that matters to GP's point. It's the fact that then "name" attribute stays the same no matter the nesting level.

There's already <figure><figcaption></figure> and <table><caption></table> as examples of embedded heading. The difference there being that figure and table elements very rarely nest.

So allowing h in <section><h><section><h></section></section> to become h1 and h2 would make sense.

  <input type="button" value="Submit">

Yes, and this is also a mistake, hence the <button> element.

::after { content: attr(id) }

What you're looking for is a <heading> tag. It would have been the right solution to this issue without introducing changes for h1-h6

People should not be downvoting you. You are absolutely write: numbered heading level is a non-modular abomination.

edit: Oh I see, yes the title shouldn't just attribute, but there is no deep reason for that, just HTML convention. I would rather what you wrote than the status quo.

> Oh I see, yes the title shouldn't just attribute, but there is no deep reason for that

A reason is that you might want formatting (bold, italics, etc) on the text of a title.

OK yes, fair. Anything that is displayed needs its own attributes, and therefore must be its own tagged thing. Good point.

Au contraire, displaying is a concern for CSS, not for HTML which is supposed to show content. In the only sense that bold or italics are appropriate in HTML is in that they sometimes transmit a meaning that can be reduced to "italic" or "bold", it would be more expressive to transmit however that <!>something is important<!/> or that it has <foreign>gravitas</foreign>.

Similarly the title of a section can be displayed with bold, or not at all, or as part of the index in the front page, or at the index at the end, or in a hovering table of contents that displays while you scroll the page, and it may be bold, big, or blue or small. All of that is a matter for the styling document, not for the content document.

The content only cares that this part is the Reptile part, not whether the R in reptile will look like a dinosaur, that's a job for style="ornamented-initial:dinosaur where the loop of the R is a mouth, and the two lower lines are the feet and the tiny t rex arms.", which would probably only be interpretable by a browser connected with a stable diffussion model.

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