: HTML5 Semantics - H1 or H2 for ARTICLE titles in a SECTION It's my understanding (based from this chapter of Dive into HTML5: http://goo.gl/9zliD) that it can be considered semantically appropriate

@Ogunnowo487

I would tend to agree with Mark Pilgrim's interpretation. If you're enclosing your article inside of an article element, then you can start over again with an h1 heading for the article.

In the HTML5 spec, articles are supposed to be treated as an independent, self-contained part of the page. You should be able to transplant the article element as is into another page without re-formatting the headings.

If article headings had to be a continuation of the document heading hierarchy, then when you drop the article directly under a body tag, you'd need to go to h1, but if you dropped it under nested sections, you'd have to change it to h3/h4/h5/etc., depending on where you place it.

In fact, any time you create a new section or article, you should go back to h1, as the following are identical:

<article>
<h1>Meta Data</h1>
<h2>Data Warehousing</h2>
<h2>On the Web</h2>
<h3>Dublin Core</h3>
<h3>XFN</h3>
<h3>Microformats</h3>
<h3>RDFa</h3>
</article>


and:

<article>
<h1>Meta Data</h1>
<section>
<h1>Data Warehousing</h1>
</section>
<section>
<h1>On the Web</h1>
<section>
<h1>Dublin Core</h1>
</section>
<section>
<h1>XFN</h1>
</section>
<section>
<h1>Microformats</h1>
</section>
<section>
<h1>RDFa</h1>
</section>
</section>
</article>


As a side note, if your header is just a heading element (e.g. h1) and nothing else, then you don't need to wrap it in a header element.

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@Megan663

Pilgrim isn't alone in contending this.

According to Jeremy Keith's HTML5 for Web Designers, you can use multiple <h1>s in a document without ruining the document summary, as long as they are nested within discrete semantic sectional tags.

Quoting directly from the eBook (which I purchased from iBooks)


So far, the new sectioning content
isn’t giving us much more than what we
could do with previous versions of
HTML. Here’s the kicker: In HTML5,
each piece of sectioning content has
its own self-contained outline. That
means you don’t have to keep track of
what heading level you should be
using—you can just start from h1 each
time:


<h1>An Event Apart</h1>
<section>
<header>
<h1>Cities</h1>
</header>
<p>Join us in these cities in 2010.</p>
<section>
<header>
<h1>Seattle</h1>
</header>
<p>Follow the yellow brick road.</p>
</section>
<section>
<header>
<h1>Boston</h1>
</header>
<p>That’s Beantown to its friends.</p>
</section>
<section>
<header>
<h1>Minneapolis</h1>
</header>
<p>It's so <em>nice</em>.</p>
</section>
</section>
<small>Accommodation not provided.</small>


(Sample code also from the book, page 73)

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@Berryessa370

The official w3schools answer to the use of heading tags on a page is as follows: H1 headings should be used as main headings, followed by H2 headings, then the less important H3 headings, and so on.

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@Michele947

While the article titles of your page are important, generally the top level heading of the page defines the content of the page. Sometimes it's the name of the article, and sometimes, as you show is the title of a listing of articles.

<h1>My Very Interesting Articles</h1>


This heading defines the whole page as 'interesting articles'. Then each article is listed but have a lesser heading level.

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