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Comment by Osmose | Hacker News Reader

Some fun historical context behind the outline algorithm and why it didn't catch on: https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=25003

In short, the W3C adopted it because they thought it was a good idea, while browsers and screen readers both refused to adopt it for various reasons like ambiguity with existing web content or concerns about screen readers having to implement and maintain their own independent outline algorithm implementations. 8 years and an entire standards organization after the thread above, the WHATWG finally dropped it.

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And <hgroup>, and <em>, and <strong>...

I'm not going to lie, I don't have a lot of faith in the people making markup decisions for HTML these days. It was obvious that none of these tags made any sense and anyone who knows what semantics mean knows they would get semantically bleached the instant they hit end users. Wordpress still uses B and I buttons for <em> and <strong>. That's never going to change because emphasis and strong are just not a thing that users understand so it can't be on the UI. In fact, I don't even understand the difference between the documentation fails to explicitly assert it. Screen readers and web browsers render them the same way as <b> and <i>. At this point I have to wonder for whom exactly what this markup created, and what problem did it seek to solve. I have no idea what was going on with the committee to take years of <h1> and <h2> meaning completely different things and think "what if <h1> meant the same thing as <h2> sometimes if it's in a <section>?" or "what if we <h3> didn't mean <h3> when it's in a <hgroup>?" This was a great place to introduce an <h> tag. Did they just want to avoid breaking backwards compatibility while at the same time not caring about it? I just don't understand...

Meanwhile everybody from users, to search engines, to social media platforms, to forums, to article writers are still waiting for a <spoiler>.

I think, if I remember correctly, that b and i are used to only alter the style of text, while strong and em are used for emphasis in something like a paragraph of text.

So you could use b in something like UI breadcrumbs, but of you wanted to strongly highlight something as an author of some text, you'd use strong.

I'm not really sure we need these though. As for my breadcrumbs example, I think everyone would use CSS rather than a b element.

So, I kinda understand the idea, but I've never needed it.

A thing that maybe comes to mind is that inner monologue in books uses italics sometimes. So using i would make sense more than em. But when wanting to emphasize/stress a word or phrase an em would make more sense than i.

+1 regarding <spoiler>!

I thought it was a good idea and liked using it. I do not see how the old "global" h1, h2, h3... system we still have to use is any better.

It's better because it's explicit. That's it.

I would prefer to use a neutral <h> tag, that was proposed in the xhtml2 specs. It always made more sense to let the browser infer the place in the hierarchy.

I've seen this done with one of the existing tags and appropriate nesting. <h1> for masthead, <h2> for major subdivisions in a huge page (essentially sub-mastheads), then <h3> for everything else with styling (and nesting in ToCs and such) being dictated either by how nested they are in <section> tags (or <div>s with an appropriate class). H3 here becomes a neutral header, and h4+ are just not used (nor is H2 in short/medium pages).

How does that help with a document structure if everything on the h3 level is the same?

I wish there was a neutral <h> element that could then be specified at an arbitrary <h~n~> sometimes I have documents that have headings 8 levels deep.

It's worse because you need knowledge of the entire rendered page even when you're creating a subsection that may get templated into the overall page.

It's like if you removed relative paths and working directories from all OSes. A lot of things become really annoying to do.

In practice you're really never going to go below <h3> unless you're writing an actual document, in which case you probably should have a good editor.

Going back a lil further to 2011… We had a lil fight[1][2] about the value of using perfect HTML semantics in the community. The outline algorithm was the big defense for <section>, but its problems were clear then: https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2011/11/pursuing-semantic-v...

[1] https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2011/11/our-pointless-pursu...

[2] https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2011/11/pursuing-semantic-v...

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