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HTML5 adds more power to the heading elements, which is a good thing. However, there appears to be no recommended element for marking up a site-wide banner title. Traditionally, many users have resorted to using h1 for the banner heading, but this may not be in the spirit of headings which introduce sections. Furthermore, the banner title would be expected to be the same for most, if not all, pages, while the h1 would be expected to be different for each page. Other available elements already have their own semantic meanings, and none of them would imply a title. A header might be the appropriate place to put such a title, but, since headers are not sections, semantically they change nothing. I would like to suggest an element which has the same logic as h1, but specifically for banners titles. I have a preference for the tag name “title” since a body title should be clearly distinct from a head title, but accept that that may not be logistically reasonable. I would prefer not to call it “banner” since that might imply a larger container. However, anything would do for me.
(In reply to Mark Simon from comment #0) > HTML5 adds more power to the heading elements, which is a good thing. > However, there appears to be no recommended element for marking up a > site-wide banner title. Pages should use H1 for that. The HTML language defines markup for individual markup; it doesn't define "site-wide" markup. > Traditionally, many users have resorted to using h1 for the banner heading, > but this may not be in the spirit of headings which introduce sections. An H1 as a child of the body element doesn't introduce a new section; instead it supplies the title for the whole document—exactly as most people expect. (BTW, "headings which introduce sections" is anyway just a abstract construct as far as HTML browsers/UAs are concerned, because it UAs don't implement the outline algorithm defined in the HTML spec.) > Furthermore, the banner title would be expected to be the same for most, if > not all, pages, while the h1 would be expected to be different for each page. That's not necessarily true at all. There's nothing that prevents a set of documents at a particular site from having the same H1 if that's the how they want to do it. And users do not necessarily expect to see a different H1 on each page. They see a title on the page and don't know nor care what the markup the author is using for it. There are so far no indications of any browser-implementer interest in adding a new <banner> (or whatever) element for this case. So it would be better to take this proposal to another forum such as discuss.webplatform.org or the public-webapps@w3.org mailing list or the whatwg@whatwg.org list, and then re-open this if/when there's new any information to add here.