Comments on: The hgroup element

By: Alice Wonder

Alice Wonder — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 08:53:03 +0000

I’ve heard it is on the chopping block as well.
I currently use it but not within article semantics, I use it within document level header element (where role=”banner”) to have web site name followed by tag line.

Since it is outside the scope of main content, it’s semantic value really is not worth anything to me, and if I end up needing to switch back to div element to wrap those headings, it won’t make a lick of difference as far as I can tell to any html clients.

By: John F. Mercer

John F. Mercer — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 00:27:53 +0000

I’ve heard that the element is about to get tossed out of the spec. Is this true? Could anyone clarify this for me? Thanks.

By: Patrick Samphire

Patrick Samphire — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 20:09:45 +0000

@Ckuhn203

You need to look more closely at the HTML5 specification. You can have multiple headers and footers, one of each for the page, and one of each for any of the sectioning elements on the page. You don’t have to have them, but they demarcate the header and footer parts of sectioning elements when they are needed.

By: Brent Lagerman

Brent Lagerman — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 20:07:02 +0000

@CKuhn you’re thinking about the old way of writing HTML, HTML5 introduces sectioning elements to break up your document into different sections, articles, asides.. etc… Each of these can have it’s own header and footer and each should have it’s own heading structure starting with H1, so you do end up with a lot of header tags, footer tags and LOTS of H1s… At first this seems kinda insane I agree, but it is a good thing, it helps parts of your document be split out for syndication, it also give you the ability to mark up your document in a way that gives it a very useful outline which could be used by screen readers and helps google and other spiders understand what your document is about…

brent
@
mimoYmima.com

By: Ckuhn203

Ckuhn203 — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 20:00:30 +0000

@ Patrick
I’m not a professional web developer or programmer, but I have enough experience to know that just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should. All of the documentation I have seen implies that header and footer should be used as the header and footer of the page. In my opinion this is good practice as it clearly defines the different sections of your page. What exactly does it mean to have two headers on a site? Does this mean your logo, site title, and horizontal nav bar show up twice, or is there confusion about what these tags are for?

By: Brent Lagerman

Brent Lagerman — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 19:44:30 +0000

I guess I still just don’t really see a desperate point for it (hgroup)… I get how to use it, but I need to look at the outliner in more detail I guess.

It’s very useful once you understand how the outliner works. Lots of times you want to have a subheading for a header and the most logical markup for that would be another heading tag with a lower number, but you almost never want that to show up in your page outline so this hgroup tag give you the ability to bundle them both together and only the first one gets outlined…

b r e n t

By: Patrick Samphire

Patrick Samphire — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 19:37:16 +0000

You should only have one header tag and one footer tag on a page.

I’m not sure that I understand your comments, but it’s certainly not true that you can only have one header tag and one footer tag per page.

By: CKuhn203

CKuhn203 — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 18:50:38 +0000

Any way… I forgot to escape. You should only have one header tag and one footer tag on a page. The hgroup defines a heading with a subheading. This adds some semantics to a style convention that a lot of authors like to use. Like I said, simple. What’s everyone so up in arms about?

By: CKuhn203

CKuhn203 — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 18:45:11 +0000

It seems to me that a lot of people are getting confused about the tag. The tags are heading tags. Not headers. You should only have one and one on a page. I think confusion about the starts to clear up once you understand this. the hgroup defines a Heading with a subtitile. That’s all. Simple.

By: Lisa

Lisa — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 07:13:10 +0000

Thanks for the post (and actually, the site) and great that you reply to people’s questions. I’m just customising a wordpress for the first time in ages and came up against hgroup.

All that you’ve said makes perfect sense, I guess I still just don’t really see a desperate point for it… I get how to use it, but I need to look at the outliner in more detail I guess. The aggregated content sample was a good way of describing how the structure can fall back and be read in different contexts but still, how often does that happen? I’ll keep an eye on the Hokey Cokey post to see if it gets shaken out again!

Someone commented further up here, “why do we need header tags anyway” and I just wanted to throw in the dirty phrase no one has mentioned (because you’re all far more concerned with the craft, which I love, but I’ve got clients who are very concerned with it) – SEO. Also, we’ve written systems that read code and they look for header tags (actually, I suppose looking for titles and subtitles could be handy…hey, I’ve almost convinced myself!). So now I’m off to read about the outliner and am wondering how multiple h1 tags will go down with SEO types who haven’t read this/anything similar…

Thanks! Lisa x