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We all know the importance ans significance of Headings for Professional Webmasters. These were known for professional developers as <h1>Heading 1</h1> h2 ... h6.

As a daring webdeveloper I lately needed more short headings for complex structured document and i thought what the hell and went ahead and used in css 

h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6{ }

h7{ }
h8{ }
h9{ }

My experiment turned out to pay back. But only in Firefox, Safari, Chrome etc, not in Internet Explorer 8.

Q1. Who(&When) decided that All headings should go upto h6, and not h4 or h7?
Q2. Why h7 -h9 work perfect in all major browsers, except IE8?
Q3. What is the significance for Bing,Yahoo and Googld in terms of recognition or headings h1 ~ h9? obviously h1 is more important than 2, but do they differentiate between h5 and h6? or not anymore after h3?

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3 Answers

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1) The w3c decided this as they are the ones who wrote the HTML 4 specs.

2) Because they don't exist. Since browsers are supposed to ignore incorrect HTML tags they simply display the content and ignore the tag. (I don't know what IE 8 does but it's probably incorrect if it is not displaying the content).

3) Most likely as the <hx> goes down in number its weight diminishes with <h6> being probably no/marginally better then using <strong>. Their exact weight is unknown.

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Great John. That is what i tought too on 2)! 1)=HTML4... boy is that a long time ago! probably a decade ago, and HTML5 is not even fully supported everywhere. Isn't that a bit slow in the internet age? Oh well. I geuesse im the only one in need of h7 ~ h9 to broaden the entire spectrum of importances of headings, breadcrums, sections, and above all, i miss matured tags to highlight stuff. sometimes i use <strong> sometimes <em> but i haven't known a better highlighter than just h7 ~ h9 as its semantics comes closest to a heading. – Sam Dec 22 '10 at 16:55
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What kind of documents are you writing that need more than 6 levels of headings? I hope you're not using headings for outlines. – Lèse majesté Dec 22 '10 at 17:34
I even see important QUOTES from famous artists, scientists etc as heading7. imagine a page opens my h1 would be the factual page title more or less, then subtitle h2 (longer text) h3 (even longer introduction into the page) then the sections h4 etc. Now, the QUOTES on the top of the page are huge but less important than say h3, and no search engine would ever understand their meaning anyway, so to give them h3 doesnt make sense. They are big and bold and italic, but earn a h7 to my viewpoint. Also for highlighting text that is isolated and captures the eyes i use h8 and h9. Your opinion? – Sam Dec 23 '10 at 8:23
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An introduction is not a heading, and neither is a quote. Quotes have their own tags: blockquote or q for inline quotes. – Lèse majesté Dec 23 '10 at 12:54
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John Conde provided a good answer, BAU.

However, I saw your comments on John Conde's reply. I'm member of WHATWG (the current HTML5 development process is: whatwg discuss, create, change, and W3C just keep a consolidated copy. Kristen from Opera is the copy keeper).

That said, there was exactly the same question a time before, asking for headings beyond H6. But only a really few websites have this need.

Your example, asking about breadcrumbs... you should not use headings at all for an auxiliar navigation widget.

The idea was refused by majority with the above explanation.

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Thanks Dave, +1, Very clarifying and i guesse i have to drop the idea becaouse of lack of support:) Just hope its not limiting to have SIX when I prefer NINE, albeit its as you said used needed on few websites. – Sam Dec 23 '10 at 16:42
@Sam yeah, the real need is just for a few websites. The unique real examples I see the need is for really long numbered lists as detailed index. Actually, h6 is almost unused. You commomly find until h3. Beyond this, the needs drop a lot. But let me give you an workaround this limitation if you want to (however SEO value will be none). You can just add headings as you wish. Then create the proper CSS styles (so far most browsers will render and display bcoz they use a XML parser as basis). For IE, you need a quick script similar to whatwg.org/demos/company-home/js/html5.js – Dave Dec 23 '10 at 18:08
up vote 1 down vote

I'm not sure exactly what kind of content you're working with, but you called it a "complex structured document". I would imagine that with this being the case it's not possible to split the content into different sections/pages.

With the level of headers you're wanting to drill down to, I wonder if you're being too liberal with what content you want tagged as a header. Like Lèse majesté, blockquotes and other tags would be more appropriate for certain chunks of content.

I work with several government websites, and run into problems like this, where the document is very long with a ton of "sections", that can't be split up and have to appear on the site exactly as it's delivered to me. Generally I build the pages as an outline, using nested lists to structure the document properly so that the order can be properly interpreted by browsers, screen readers, etc.

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That's what I'd recommend as well. And even though HTML5 isn't well-supported yet (and breaks backwards compatibility with IE6 and 7), you can use structural labels (maxdesign.com.au/2006/01/17/about-structural-labels ) along with an outline structure to both style and define the semantic significance of elements that there aren't specific tags for. – Lèse majesté Dec 23 '10 at 16:07

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