[Wikipedia-l] generic markup and miscoded templates

Thu Sep 26 01:19:44 UTC 2002

Tom Parmenter wrote:
> |From: Brion VIBBER <brion at pobox.com>
> |Level-three headers (===) are well established as the standard header on 
> |Wikipedia. If you hate this so much, better to simply redefine it to 
> |pump out ideologically correct <H2> tags instead of <H3> rather than to 
> |prescribe the change of thousands of pages and demand a change in markup 
> |behavior.
> 
> It's not that I *hate* them.  I don't.  It's that you aren't supposed
> to start in the middle, with H3, but at the beginning with H1, title
> of article, H2, second level header, etc.  That isn't "ideologically
> correct", that is standard markup, SGML, HTML, XML, SDML, you name
> it.  

The HTML standard neither prescribes nor proscribes such strict 
hierarchical use of the header tags, though it does note that "some 
people consider skipping heading levels to be bad practice". The levels 
are certainly *not* defined as hierarchical, but simply as a range "with 
H1 as the most important and H6 as the least".

See:
http://www.w3.org/TR/1998/REC-html40-19980424/struct/global.html#h-7.5.5

So there's no justification for the level-two crusade based on the 
transformation of wiki to HTML markup. If you want to enforce this 
personal preference as part of wiki markup, then speak up and explicitly 
say so. The parser can be adjusted accordingly.

 >  If numbering doesn't work right?

Automatic section numbering is dubious at best.

 >  If any
> number of existing or imaginable passes over Wikipedia articles don't
> work right?

Passes of what?

 >  And, if not, then why do we have generic markup at all?

Such as?

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)