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Formal Meaning vs Human Interpretation

As predicted in my initial posting, I am not very good at hosting a blog … long time no see.

Anyways: on the project I’m currently working on, I’ve had an interesting discussion with the interaction designer. The interaction designer had implemented the web application’s graphics design, based on our ID drafts, in HTML and CSS … which I was to transfer to JSP.

He had, however, marked up some headings which logically speaking were H2s, as H3s, and the corresponding H3s as H2s. This lead to sub headings taking the role of headings - and the other way around.

My first reaction was that this is not a good solution. Think of a heading hierarchy as the one listed below:

  • Europe
    • Norway
  • Asia
    • Japan

Representing this hierarchy in HTML using headings, Europe and Asia are clearly the main headings, while Norway and Japan are sub headings. Hence, Europe should be enclosed in heading tags of greater importance than Norway’s (e.g. H1 vs. H2).

<h1>Europe</h1>
<h2>Norway</h2>
<h1>Asia</h1>
<h2>Japan</h2>

“Semantically speaking”, this the right way to do it, which is why I was a little surprised why anyone would do it the other way around.

The interaction designer’s argument was, however, interesting. In our case, Europe was - logically speaking - the main heading, he agreed, but the most interesting heading - from the user’s and the page’s context - was Norway. Therefore, he argued, the emphasis should be on Norway and we end up with a, logically speaking, false hierarchy:

  • Norway
    • Europe
  • Japan
    • Asia

But what is logically false may not be that wrong (?). The rationale is that search engines and browsers without CSS support should “see” and/or display the information that is important as seen from the user’s perspective, not necessarily what is logically correct.

In a “Most recent articles” section of a new site, the headings of the individual articles are what is important to the user (if any), not the “Most recent articles” heading in and of itself.

I do not fully agree, as you simply apply CSS to the sub headings in order to visualize the importance, but I do think it is an interesting point of view: “Is what is logically correct necessarily what you want to emphazise?”. And, as the interaction designer put it: HTML was designed for laying out scientific articles, not what we do.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 26th, 2007 at 13:15 and is filed under Information Architecture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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