floating heads -- do they exist?

Lou Burnard (lou@vax.ox.ac.uk)
Thu, 12 Aug 1993 15:31:30 +0200


From: OXVAX::LOU "Lou Burnard" 12-AUG-1993 14:29:42.34
To: MX%"Nathan.Torkington@vuw.ac.nz"
CC: LOU
Subj: Re: Semantics of <Hn>

Nat says:
> If a region has a
>heading associated with it, it should be defined as a region ie
> <REGION><H1>heading1</H1>
> text of the region
> </REGION><REGION><H1>next heading</H1>
> ...
>
>This means that the <H> tags have presentation only value under the
>current DTD, and therefore they should be allowed (as I said) wherever
>paragraphs are, as well as between items in a list.

I nearly agree with this, but have two reservations.

(1) H1s are so frequently interpreted as being synonymous with
<region1><h1> ... (as Nat points out) that it's asking for trouble not to
constrain their position a bit more.

(2) One dtd I've been using has two different kinds of heading tag -- a
<head> which can appear *only* at the start of a region, and a <caption>
which can appear anywhere else, but doesn't start a new region.

The trouble is that it's heard to see how you would tag something as a
heading without there being something following which it is the heading
of - and which therefore is a region.

The only cases I know of are the "pull quotes" which appear typically in
magazines (where you have a sentence or so in big letters splashed down
in the middle of a paragraph to catch your eye) and -- less
persuasively--very low level newspaper captions where it's just too
much time and trouble to mark every paragraph as a region.

Lou