Fixing the Planet <h1> <h2> evil; Bad SLUG, no slug biscuit

Fixing the Planet <h1> <h2> evil

I notice that Andrew’s recent entry has triggered all kinds of evil on Planet SLUG and to a lesser extent on Planet Twisted. The nature of the evil is two-fold:

  1. RSS feeds contain an unrestricted subset of HTML tags, therefore there is a collision between tags the maintainer of the planet wants to use in their own content that goes around the blog entries, and tags the entry authors use.
  2. HTML doesn’t really do sectioning. At one point I heard XHTML2 was going to have section tags with h tagged heading embedded within them. This is a better idea than having the author of pieces of content needing to know what level of heading tag to use to fit into sites designed by someone else.

The solution I’m thinking of using on planets I maintain will apply special CSS properites to headings inside entries to make them less prominent:

 div.blogbody h1, div.blogbody h2 { font-size: large; text-decoration: none; } 

I should look up how to reduce their prominence to screen readers too. Alas, the fundamental semantic nastiness of having the following in the HTML will remain:

 <h2>Blog Entry title generated by Planet software</h2> <h2>Blog entry <em>sub-title</em> coded as h2 by content author</h2> 

Bad SLUG, no slug biscuit

I think Planet SLUG is still sending the character encoding as iso8859-1 while they’re actually sending utf8 content. (eg the character ‘ó’ in Andrew’s entry)