From: Evan Prodromou &lt;evan(a)wikitravel.org&gt; Organization: Evan Prodromou Reply-To: MediaWiki announcements and site admin list &lt;mediawiki-l(a)Wikimedia.org&gt; Date: Wed, 19 Nov 2003 14:49:18 -0500 To: MediaWiki announcements and site admin list &lt;mediawiki-l(a)Wikimedia.org&gt; Cc: Wikitravellers &lt;wikitravellers(a)wikitravel.org&gt; Subject: [Mediawiki-l] Headers -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 So, the way MediaWiki markup works now, something that looks like "=this=" gets rendered as "<h1>this</h1>", and something that looks like "==this==" gets rendered as "<h2>this</h2>", and so on with more equal signs making deeper HTML header tags. The problem with this is that the stylesheets we have render <h1> tags really, really big. It seems like people try to avoid using one- or even two-equals headers, just because they render outrageously large. This seems like a bad precedent to me. The equal signs, in my opinion, should be used more as *logical* section separators than for physical formatting. I think that the top level of sections in a page should use one equal sign -- always, without exception -- and subsections of those sections should use two equal signs, and so on and so forth. My question is: how can we get the rendering right so "=this=" renders more neatly, and less obstructively, on a page? One quick-and-dirty solution is to just have the rendering code shift everything down one - -- "=this=" becomes "<h2>this</h2>", and "==this==" becomes "<h3>this</h3>", and so on and so forth. The problem with that strategy, of course, is that you bottom out at five section levels, which I personally think is fine for pages at the granularity of Wikitravel (and Wikipedia, AFAICT). When someone uses two equal signs for a top-level section header, that's pretty much what they're doing, anyways. The other possibility is changing the stylesheets to make h1, h2, h3, etc. tags somewhat smaller. This seems to be a little less flexible, wouldn't necessarily work with all browsers, and is harder to get right. Suggestions, ideas, comments?

~ESP - -- Evan Prodromou &lt;evan(a)wikitravel.org&gt; Wikitravel - http://www.wikitravel.org/ The free, complete, up-to-date and reliable world-wide travel guide