Intent to Prototype: headingstart attribute.

[Keith Cirkel]

Contact emails

chro...@keithcirkel.co.uk, cl...@smockle.com

Explainer

https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/5033

Specification

(Not yet available)

Summary

Adding a `headingstart=` attribute to Element nodes, that influences the child `h1`-`h6` elements' heading levels.

Blink component

Blink>DOM

Motivation

Websites which allow users to write comments or documents (User Generated Content - UGC) rely on users to produce meaningful heading structures for their written content. This can be difficult for a user where this content is presented on different surfaces (web pages or applications) that have different document structures. Giving web developers a headingstart attribute frees users from trying to pick the correct heading level (they can always start their comment or document at h1), and makes it significantly easier for web developers to render blocks of UGC without rewriting the UGC authors defined heading structures.

Initial public proposal

https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/5033

TAG review

None

TAG review status

Pending

Risks

Interoperability and Compatibility

None

Gecko: No signal

WebKit: No signal

Web developers: Positive

Other signals:

WebView application risks

Does this intent deprecate or change behavior of existing APIs, such that it has potentially high risk for Android WebView-based applications?

None

Debuggability

None

Is this feature fully tested by web-platform-tests?

No

Flag name on chrome://flags

Experimental Web Platform Features

Finch feature name

None

Non-finch justification

None

Requires code in //chrome?

False

Estimated milestones

No milestones specified

Link to entry on the Chrome Platform Status

https://chromestatus.com/feature/5090991750250496

[Tab Atkins Jr.]

There's been significant discussion in that thread over what the precise behavior should be, particularly when elements using the attribute are nested. Can you elaborate on which behavior you're intending to prototype?

[Keith Cirkel]

We’re looking at prototyping the additive model in your latest comments Tab. We’ll also be implementing the similar model across GitHub.com (for internal validation only, for now) to see how well it aligns to our desired model. Hope this helps. 

[Brian Kardell]

But not experimenting at all with some kind of auto?

[Keith Cirkel]

Initially, no. I think there’s scope to introduce auto later, if I’m not mistaken. 

[Keith Cirkel]

I should add that we’re open to the idea of auto, and definitely see the use. We’d like to iterate on the feature, assessing the impact & complexity at each step to ensure we don’t end up quagmired.