Ortolan88 wrote in part:
Toby Bartels wrote:
When rendering a page, we should first measure all of the header markups and then render the shortest as <h2>, the next as <h3>, and so on. (Anybody that really needs a header of a specific size can still create this by putting the HTML tag in directly.) Then you can start with == or ===, or even = or =========, and it will still render as <h2> if it's the shortest one.
Tom [Ortolan88] is happy, because good HTML is being produced. [I forget who the principal opponent is] is happy, because current articles don't have to be rewritten. At least I hope that y'all're happy; responses?
Tom is unhappy because Tom doesn't care about good HTML; Tom wants good generic markup in the Wikipedia that will permit various processors, HTML and otherwise, including future processors that we know nothing about, to produce output that is organized and presented as it was originally designed to be presented in the Wikipedia.
Ah, so it was the *wiki* code that you wanted to be robust, not so much the resulting HTML; that's a good attitude.
In the specific case of the == and === and ====, that means that not only will the headlines be presented in appropriately sized faces, but that the organization of the article can be "understood" by an application that is, say, looking only for External Links, or, say, creating an outline from a Wikipedia article, or, who knows what some future application might be able to do with properly organized material that it can parse according to some well established rules.
Why can't these other parsers (which I agree will exist in the future) parse the header markup according to the same rule that I just suggested?
Of course, that is all an ideal and there are thousands of articles that don't conform, but if new articles conform and old articles are fixed by people who understand that the present Wikipedia is not the only way the articles in the Wikipedia will or can be used, then the Wikipedia will be better, worth more, used more, and last longer.
And in the meantime, these thousands of articles are rendered badly. If we change the HTML rendering (thereby changing the standard for any future parsers) to make the primary header always <h2>, then these thousands of articles will be rendered correctly. And then you and Ram-Man -- and me for that matter, for I do this too -- can put the wiki code in specific pages in a consistent style at our leisure.
-- Toby