On Mon, 4 Apr 2005, Matthew Raymond wrote:
That said, this is how I would process the sample markup:
<body> <p>...</p> <unnamed section> <h1>A</h1> 1 A (importance level 1)
I agree with most of what you said but the problem I have with the above is that it means almost every document will have an anonymous section at the top, and I don't think that makes sense.
If "<p>...</p>" were instead a list of hyperlinks to different sections of the document, should that list be part of the first section? If the paragraph inside the <p> element starts with "I'd like to thank such-and-such for sticking by me while I wrote this...", is that part of the first section?
The way I see it, if a heading starts a section, it should always be the start of a section. To do otherwise breaks consistency and may introduce semantics that are not backwards compatible in some situations.
Better to use something like "[Top of the document]" that denotes that describes the position of the content without naming it, and also identifies that there is content before the first heading.
| <body> | <p>...</p> | <Top> (importance level 1) | <h1>A</h1> | 1 A (importance level 1)
Even in the case of:
<body> <h1>...</h1>
...there's an anonymous section, because you have a whitespace text node before the element. That doesn't really work for me.
Why do outline generators need to worry about text nodes at the beginning that contain only whitespace? You're talking about content that won't be rendered, so for all intents and purposes, the heading is the first item in the <body>. Such whitespace can simply be ignored by outliners. However, if you are suggesting that such unrendered whitespace be associated with the first section, I have no problem with that. ;)
