[Suggestion] Implementing H1 Headings without coding

[remi]

@Paul: There are always two sides necessary, in order to let a discussion come to no end.

@John (covoxer):

Fact 4. The <h1> element is not user visible. It is easy to make text within it look like a paragraph text or even be completely invisible. If SE would rely on it, it would provide another way to fool the SE just the way description metatag did.

The blue colored part of this paragraph is a fact, the violet colored part is your assumption, the interpretation from your side. But whether a search engine is able to recognize fools or not is more the headache of the Google engineers. Additionally, besides the simple recommendation from Google to use headers, the second point with using such tags like <h1> - <h6> is, that they are also necessary for well structured, semantically meaningful HTML (we've discussed this before). Using good clean markup (including headers) is just best practices.

If you're planning to include a styles concept within Xara Xtreme and/or Xara Web Designer, you should do it with support of semantically meaningful HTML tags and the necessary CSS. For now I see no reasons except your and Charles dissenting opinions, why one should follow anti-patterns instead.

Simon Collison was saying it a little bit more jovially: "You can’t read a woman’s mind, but good markup is transparent. Like great lovers, CSS and well-structured code are bound by fate, and are destined to live happily ever after." [1]

Some concrete tips for you:

• Use predefined styles called "Header 1" to "Header 6" like in text editors and match them to <h1> - <h6> tags during the export.
• Outsource the CSS for such headers to an external stylesheet.
• Furthermore let users define additional styles on their own without matching them to <h1> - <h6> tags during the export (if they really need more than 6 headers)
• and you're finished.

Give it a chance, instead of fighting against Web Standards.

Remi