On Sat, Jun 11, 2005 at 06:29:49PM -0700, Brion Vibber wrote:
Do you have any particular reason to allow only 5 levels ? That breaks backwards compatibility and reduces range of allowed options for no good reason.
HTML < XHTML 2.0 provides only six levels of headings; our existing syntax, inherited from UseModWiki, directly maps each given ={1,6} to
<h1>..<h6>. The first level is reserved by MediaWiki for the page itself.
We could do additional levels by using different elements for headings beyond <h6> in our HTML output, if we really needed to, but we don't support those now and I doubt there's much reason to add them.
Manually adding level-1 headings is deprecated already, but we let the current parser accept them as a stop-gap measure so that existing ones could be fixed up without breaking in the meantime. (IIRC, on the request of pl.wikipedia folks.)
A side note: XHTML 2.0 will introduce a new abstraction for headers based on nested <section>s, each of which can contain a <h>, to arbitrary depth: http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml2/mod-structural.html#sec_8.5.
I'm not sure if that's a model we might want to consider; that kind of large-scale nesting doesn't really map well to the wiki model, which favors line-based chunks.
We can have as many header levels as we want with CSS classes. That's what we already do, page title and article's level-1 headers look different.
Anyway, it costs nothing, preserves backwards compatibility, and is useful in at least some cases (otherwise it wouldn't be used), so why remove it ?