Sorry, needed to repeat the H1 title to remind me what this is all about :-)

The header structure is there, along with paragraph, block quotes, emphasis and text/font attributes to build structure into your ‘document’, just like a word processor.

There is no such rule for having one or more H1 headings, but there is, as someone has already pointed out, a need to structure your headings so that they would, for example, make sense in a table of contents. You might make a rule to have one document title with a structure of headings below it. Think of it like a report structure.

A H1 heading might give more emphasis to search engines when, for example, the words are wrapped in anchor tags, which are ferenced from a TOC at the head of the page, like this…

Being wrapped in an anchor, the words have some sort of importance to Google PageRank when compare to no anchors, so I have read. However, this is something I tend to do for larger documents to make it easier for viewers to navigate around it - just the same as I do in my word processor for lengthy reports.

So for me, sprucing up the HTML is all about enabling people to view my sites’ content and move around the document with ease.

The easiest way to check your heading structure nowadays is to use the Web Developer extension in Firefox.

Actually, using the ‘Table of Contents’ user style sheet in Opera 9.5 is even easier – you don’t even have to download and install an extension. ;)

Why? The H1 can be attention grabbing, the H5 brief explanation. We should not let the code get in the way of the message. Resist the urge at all costs to let the code get in the way of visual impact!

It appears you haven’t fully grasped the purpose of HTML. It’s about marking up semantics and structure. It has nothing whatsoever to do with presentation. For visual ‘impact’, use CSS. That’s its purpose, after all.

I was merely trying to point out that any site, not just SitePoint, may spend too much time making their site Vis Imp safe, when the likely audience is very unlikely to have Vis Imp visitors.

Search engine spiders are effectively visually impaired visitors. Even if you’re greedy and callous and couldn’t care less about people with disabilities, you probably want to be nice to the ‘bots.

There´s the technical aspect of coding HTML and then there´s the Semantical Html part and then we need to mix it all to the Visual part via CSS, which by the way has its intrinsic issues also.

Not sure if I made myself clear here, but what I trying to point out here is that HTML development can be very personal and what appears to be right to one, can look very wrong to another.

Some rules are very clear, like: Declare Your Language or Declare Your Character Encoding, but some like: Use just one H1 per page is very particular/personal rule.

Maybe the best thing to do is to pre-establish some rules with your development team. This is not just for Html, but for the whole development cicle too. IMHO the most important thing is creating a solid development architecture, establishing the bases and only the start developing. It´s hard work since web development is client and server side combination.

Well, that´s it … hope it helps …

I don’t understand the comments from users who say there can only be one h1 level on a page. Why not? I would consider the title tag to be the first element, then the h1 levels would be the next, and then h2, etc.

I also agree with the user listing the various country sub-divisions and using that as a logical reason to skip heading levels on a particular page. Going straight from h1 to h2 to h3 on a page that stands alone is fine. But if you have a single style sheet that is applied across dozens of pages, it is far easier to be consistent in a tag of h3 always defining a county (and therefore always having the same style applied) across all of the pages than to say, OK, on this page we have a county for xyz country, but no regions, so on this page the county will have an h2 tag (which of course makes it look differently).

I don’t like add a whole bunch of additional markup just to make the two LOOK the same when in fact a county on one page SHOULD BE a county on another page — whether visually impaired or not.

I also agree with the user listing the various country sub-divisions and using that as a logical reason to skip heading levels on a particular page. Going straight from to to on a page that stands alone is fine. But if you have a single style sheet that is applied across dozens of pages, it is far easier to be consistent in a tag of always defining a county (and therefore always having the same style applied) across all of the pages than to say, OK, on this page we have a county for xyz country, but no regions, so on this page the county will have an tag (which of course makes it look differently).

I don’t like add a whole bunch of additional markup just to make the two LOOK the same when in fact a county on one page SHOULD BE a county on another page — whether visually impaired or not.

One solution would be to have a “dummy heading” at h3 to fill the gap, but that could confuse users if they only find one sub-division and are looking for others.

What about using CSS to style them and have them set as
use classes
.region
.counties
.districts
.departments

Or flip it
Region > Counties > Departments > Districts

Or if what you are really sorting is departments then maybe that is the most important thing
Departments > Region > Counties > Districts

Flipping to a bit of DB organization, What are you indexing..What should you be indexing? How is the list going to be used and what would be more efficient?
I think that’s on of the big points of the Formal Outline. It allows you to organize and re organize your thoughts into the best possible way while still working with pencil and paper. If it doesn’t fit, reexamine it and make sure you are right before you find yourself committed with 500 lined of code written.

Many H1 ? Does your page have more than a title ? There should be only one h1, you don’t have two titles for a page.

Back in High school when learning how to write outlines. I remember being taught that if you have a I. then you need a II. And if you have an A. then you need a B.

So if you have a
I.
A.
a.
b.
B.

An instructor would say you need to set it to
I.
A.
B.
II.

Should a Title and a H1 be the same? Or like a formal outline are they 2 different parts of the layout? If the html heading were originally styled after the formal outline(and I think they were) then why do we diverge here?