Question

I’m building a page with some news items on it.

The current HTML I have is:

<h1>News</h1>
<article>
  <h2>Item 1</h2>
  <p>Lorem ipsum</p>
  <footer>
    <ul>
      <li>By: me</li>
      <li>31-12-2011</li>
    </ul>
  </footer>
</article>
<article>
  <h2>Item 2</h2>
  <p>Lorem ipsum</p>
  <footer>
    <ul>
      <li>By: me</li>
      <li>31-12-2011</li>
    </ul>
  </footer>
</article>

As you can see I use a <h2> for the article title.

However now I’m thinking it should also be a <h1> since it is in the ‘scope’ of the article element.

So: What would be the semantically correct element to use for the title of my news items?

Answer 1

From an HTML5 point of view, either is fine, and amount to the same thing.

For non-HTML5 aware processors though, the ranking of h2 will be understood correctly and h1 will not, so at the present time, while HTML5 is still new, I’d err on the side of caution and use h2, unless you need more than six levels of heading.