Tom Parmenter wrote:
|From: Brion VIBBER brion@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)