Styles: remove the H3 heading for subject icons

[ninetydegrees]

Title:
Styles: remove the H3 heading for subject icons

Area:
styles

Summary:
Comment subjects are wrapped in H4 heading tags while comment subject icons are wrapped in H3 tags, as if they were a level above the comment subjects they go with. It makes little sense to me.

Description:
This is what the page organization looks like on custom comment pages:

H3: entry title/no 

   H4: comment title/no subject
H3: comment subject icon for the comment above

   H4: comment title/no subject

   H4: comment title/no subject

Is there even a point to having a heading tag for icons? There's no text at all (not even alt text).

Poll #5113 Styles: remove the H3 heading for subject icons

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 37

View Respondents

This suggestion:

View Answers

Should be implemented as-is.
14 (37.8%)

Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
1 (2.7%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
1 (2.7%)

(I have no opinion)
20 (54.1%)

(Other: please comment)
1 (2.7%)

Comments

[noracharles]

Is there even a point to having a heading tag for icons?

Does it format the alt text?

I agree that icons should not be a level above the comments they go with. I think they should be the same level.

Thinking more about formating, having two elements with the same headline level would be bad, because that would make them look like to different sections.

So I think icons should remain above comment titles, the way they are now.

[ninetydegrees]

Subject icons don't have any alt text.

I see I need to clarify: icons aren't above comment titles, they're below them: you jump from a H4 to an H3 to go back to an H4 for the next comment. It would make sense if the icon was an H5. Except there's no text. Why is it a heading then?

[noracharles]

Thank you for the clarification. Yeah, it would only make sense if the icons were above the titles.

I don't know enough about styles to understand if it makes a difference, and certainly far far less than you do, but if a discussion were saved as a .doc, then the headline tags would be reflected in the way the elements were indented. But they still ought to nest correctly, with the icons being H5.

[turlough]

I don't know enough to have an opinion on this.

It just makes no sense.

[marahmarie]

I don't see why a usericon needs a heading. I'm thinking page structure/hierarchy does not call for it, at all. Icons could use semantic markup (if they don't have that already, I just don't feel like looking right now) and alt and title tag text to make them more machine-readable, for assistive technologies and indexing/archiving/off-site retrieval purposes, I guess, but beyond that? Nuh-uh.

[daweaver]

Am I missing something here? Looking at this page through ?format=light, I don't see any H3 tags at all.

[ninetydegrees]

This is only in styled comment pages, not pages that are site-skinned. See what I mean?