Talk.Headings

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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

-- RadomirDopieralski 2006-08-30

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

we have

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

MarkGaved 02-Sept-06 It's just names, and I think it's up to the wiki that adopts the markup to choose the terminology. However, consider this:

======= Sub Sub Sub Sub Sub Heading

Of course, more descriptive names can be always used:

== Title
=== Chapter
==== Section
===== Sub Section
====== Sub Sub Section
======= Paragraph

But I suggest to stick to well-known and unambigous names for now. Since the markup is going to be converted into HTML, I think it's reasonable to use the HTML terms.

-- RadomirDopieralski, 2006-09-02

I think the page should clearly say whether we expect these to nest or not.

== [[link]]

Yes or no? Personally, I'd like to think that they do not nest, because I think it is bad style to place links in headings, or switch heading style using additional markup. We could at least be explicit about not deciding and say that it is implementation-dependent.

I was also surprised to see that now more levels are supported instead of what it said a few days ago. These changes might seem small, and I might be guilty of extending the recommendation in some places as well, but for a process that needs to gather support in code, this is frustrating. Do we need stronger gatekeeping? Do we need a 0.1 out so that we can put such changes in a 0.2?

I guess the reason I noticed was that I thought the limitation to three levels was a good thing. It would seem to me that a wiki page with more than two levels is already bad style. But six? The mind boggles.

-- AlexSchroeder

There is a discrepancy between the AllMarkup and Headings pages. On AllMarkup it says:

== Level 1 (Largest) ==
=== Level 2 ===
==== Level 3 ====

On the Headings page it says:

== Level 2 (largest) ==
=== Level 3 ===
==== Level 4 ====
===== Level 5 =====
====== Level 6 ======

Shall I just fix it?

-- MartinBudden

Heading Level 1 should be allowed#

= Level 1 =

has beed excluded. As far as I know, no other wiki excludes level 1 headings, so why is Creole different? Even MediaWiki allows level 1 headings: there is a convention that they are never used, because the same style is used for the page title, nevertheless they are allowed. If a wiki site wants, by convention, to disallow level 1 headings then that is fine, however this should be a matter of editorial policy for the wiki site and not something that is mandated by Creole.

-- MartinBudden, 2006-11-16

Can you point us to a link where you read about this convention?

-- ChristophSauer, 2006-11-16

See: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Editing#Most_frequent_wiki_markup_explained under the "Section headings" cell in the table. In particular the statement: "Start with 2 equals signs not 1 because 1 creates H1 tags which should be reserved for page title."

-- MartinBudden, 2006-11-16

The question "Why does Creole exclude level 1 headings?" still has not been answered.

-- MartinBudden, 2006-12-06

I personally don't see why anyone would want to have level 1 headings if the title of a page is already level 1. Do you have a good reason to allow them?

-- ChuckSmith, AlexSchroeder 2006-12-06

One of the reasons I like the term Creole for what is trying to be achieved here is that the analogy with spoken language is a good one. When I first read the term Wiki Creole I immediately had a good idea of what was trying to be achieved. (And I also thought that the approach would have a reasonable chance of success.) A Creole is a language derived from a combinations of languages that allows communication between speakers of different tongues. A Creole is, by its nature, inclusive, so I argue that the shoe is on the other foot - you have to make a case to exclude something. Having said that, here's the case for inclusion:

1. The convention that level 1 headings are page titles is a MediaWiki convention, it is not used by all wikis. (So the answer to the statement "I personally don't see why anyone would want to have level 1 headings if the title of a page is already level 1" is that page titles may not be level 1 headings for a particular wiki.)
2. There are many wikis where level 1 headings are widely used. When users of these wikis adopt Creole they will find things that they used to be able to type no longer work.
3. If someone wanted to migrate some wikitext from a wiki that used equals signs for headings (there are quite a few) but also used level one headings then they would either have the error prone task of adding an extra equals sign to all their headings, or they would have to write (or obtain a script).
4. Creole should not set policy, it should leave that to the community that uses a particular wiki. The community may have good reason to form a convention that level 1 headings should be used.

-- MartinBudden, 2006-12-06

Thanks Martin for this good analysis. It was a quick decission at the workshop, there where so many other points. Nobody gave it to much thought i guess. We should allow level one headings in creole 0.3.

-- ChristophSauer, 2006-12-07

Thank you Martin for some very good reasoning. Alex, would you care to comment?

--ChuckSmith, 2006-12-07

I don't understand this discussion. Creole just says that you need at least two equal signs to make a heading -- this is consistent with "at least two characters for markup" informal rule. How you translate it to HTML is dependent on the engine used -- some engines have the <h1> tag reserved for page titles, others don't, some might even lack headings at all -- and use <div class="heading"> or even (please forgive me) <b>. The same wiki engine might even render headings differently depending whether the page title is present (in normal view) or not (in print view). Note that (X)HTML in the examples is just suggested markup. I think that there is really not much to argue here. -- RadomirDopieralski, 2006-12-11

I must disagree with you Randomir about the number of = signs. One of the unofficial Goals states that elements should start with one characters, adding more when required.

Also, a quick survey of Headings on WikiMatrix gives the following results amongst Wiki engines that allow multiple headings in one way or another :

1. Starts at 1 (or with one charater): 68%
2. Starts at 2 (or with two characters): 19%
3. Headings in reverse : 13%

IMHO, headings should start at level 1 with 1 equal sign. Martin has some very convincing arguments.

However, I completely agree with you about the implementation. The rendering should be left to the engine. I put a note on my personal page about what the specs should do we the X(HTML) suggestion.

-- EricChartre, 2006-12-28

---

Why in the world would you disallow links in headings? This is commonly done on a good many wikis, and there are many good reasons to do it, such as when there is already a good article on a topic and you just want to summarize the article.

Also why not support the tikiwiki show/hide convention +/- as part of headings? So ===- means "third level heading, show this hidden by default", and ===+ means "no matter whether this was open or closed last time, show it open every time".

If you have ANY show/hide convention at all, the use of links in headings is even more important: they avoid having to open up a section to link to another page where the matter is dealt with in more detail.

It's also absurd to disallow links in edit summary/change note where they are essential, e.g. to link to a policy being enforced or another page being referred or a user involved