The WHATWG Blog

Article 1: Websites and Sectioning
Part 1: The Basics

As a researcher by hobby, I often find myself reading through various encyclopedic websites. Whether it be a wiki, or a single purpose website devoted specifically to that aim, I spend countless hours of my time using them.

With the new work on HTML to semantically markup a website, I am rather excited to see what the future may hold for such informational websites. The concepts written in the specifications and drafts are very intriguing, and will hopefully someday improve the semantic importance of the web. Combine this with the ability for future screen readers, search engines, etc. to extract such data, the possibilities are near endless.

However, as I have read around, I have noticed that not all things are as clear as they should be. Although it has been several years since the formerly labeled HTML5 specification has come into the light, I can still see these arguments floating about.

In this specific case, I am referring to the use of the semantic elements such as <article>, <section>, and so-forth, as well as their relationship to the <h1>-<h6> elements.

Because it seems that many are in disagreement about the matter, I felt I should share my opinions as to what they mean, and how they could be used.

Below, you will see the method I have devised for sectioning out content.

(Note: All information is of my personal opinion, and may not reflect the views of other web designers, the WHATWG, or the W3C.)

Firstly, let us imagine the idea of a web page, likely encyclopedic in content. This page has a single focus, a single section, and a single paragraph.

At the very basic, it would be marked up as follows:

<article>
<section>
<p>Hello, World!</p>
</section>
</article>

As we can see, this bare minimum design utilizes three elements: <article>, <section>, and <p>. These elements, as can be semantically understood, represent the start of the article, the internal section, and the paragraph within the section.

Fairly simple, right?

Well, let’s take this a step further. What if you were to want to add a title to the article?

This is how it would be done.

<article>
<header><h1>Hello, World!</h1></header>
<section>
<p>Hello, World!</p>
</section>
</article>

Now, we see the addition of two new elements: <header> and <h1>. The <header> element designates this region of the document as the header of the article. The <h1> element designates this line of text as the title, or heading of the article.

Still, this seems simple, doesn’t it?

For our next step, let’s say that we wish to increase the scope of this article, from Hello, World! to Hello, World! and Foobar.

<article>
<header><h1>Hello, World! and Foobar</h1></header>
<section>
<h1>Hello, World!</h1>
<p>Hello, World!</p>
</section>
<section>
<h1>Foobar</h1>
<p>Foo</p>
<p>Bar</p>
</section>
</article>

Now we have an article which is both titled, and has two titled sections, each containing a heading within an <h1> element. We also have the article itself, headed within both an <h1> and <header> element.

This concept, though simplistic, is easy to read by humans, and holds semantic value to machines and scripts.

In conclusion, this is the way that I view the new method of sectioning content in HTML. Using this method, we come up with a quick, easy method to divide a document, and even a website, into logical sections which can be easily read by both humans and machines.

Next time, we will be discussing part two of this topic: Styling.

Until then,

-Christopher Bright