Talk.Headings

BrionVibber noted at the WMS Workshop that Wikipedia starts its headings with two equals signs because the page title itself is considered as the top level heading. I find this a useful assumption. Our LaTex converter for JSPWiki makes the same assumption, combining different Wikipages as chapters using the page titles.

It would also cleanly stand out of the text. Just to compare the two aproaches...

= Heading
- listelem 1
- listelem 2
- listelem 3

== Heading
- listelem 1
- listelem 2
- listelem 3

On the other hand, with one heading at the beginning it would be faster to type. Also the headings usually stand out cleanly in the text anyway because you create a new paragraph for them. I don't know how that is going with the rule of consistency. The rule could go something like this:

• all static elements that do not resize with incresing number or characters like bold, italic, links etc have always two characters
• all dynamic elements that resize with incresing number of charaters like headings and lists always start with one character.

-- Christoph 28-Aug-06

Does the proposal mean carriage return followed by the Heading characters in the first column of the new line? or will we be more tolerant than that? MarkGaved 30-Aug-06

You mean something like this?

                                 == I like to center with spaces

Don't forget that it can also be the first characters on the page, in which case there is no carriage return in front of them. Just to be complete ;-)

-- JanneJalkanen, 2006-08-31

I believe we should also allow equal signs at the end of a header for those coming from MediaWiki and similar engines. -- ChuckSmith

I'm a little concerned about the additional cognitive overhead of remembering 2 equals (=) characters as Heading 1 ... I like one equals character means "Heading 1", 2 means Heading 2, 3 means Heading 3 etc. Though I suppose it works as 2 asterisks means bold, and 2 means italic... Maybe if we decide the top level heading is to have 2 equals symbols we change the naming to Heading, SubHeading, Sub-SubHeading?

so rather than

== Heading 1
=== Heading 2
==== Heading 3

== Main Heading
=== Sub Heading
==== Sub Sub Heading