Styles for book title and highest level sections

[amoroso]

What styles are most appropriate for an ebook title in the title page, and the highest level sections such as chapters or parts?

If I use Heading 1/<H1> for the title, should highest level sections be Heading 2/<H2>? Heading 1 for both the title and highest level sections? Or maybe the title should be formatted differently without heading styles?

[theducks]

Originally Posted by amoroso

What styles are most appropriate for an ebook title in the title page, and the highest level sections such as chapters or parts?

If I use Heading 1/<H1> for the title, should highest level sections be Heading 2/<H2>? Heading 1 for both the title and highest level sections? Or maybe the title should be formatted differently without heading styles?

I believe in K.I.S.S.

So I set the Title to H1

Any "Parts or Books" as H2

and Chapters always to H3 , regardless of presence/lack of H2.

The TOC will indent properly
Title
Part1
Chapters
Part2
More chapters (those belonging to Part 2)
Partx
. . .


You can still do additional H level styling via the stylesheet

[JSWolf]

I prefer chapter titles set as H2 and if you have a separate page for part/sections, use H1. Also, I prefer the titles/headings to be in a sans-serif font with the body in a serif font.

[shall1028]

What I have been doing is reserving H1, H2, H3, etc. for the body of the work only. H3 as a basic chapter header and H1 & H2 for higher level items like Books and Parts.

For the title page I have a #titlepage "id" in my CSS file under which I create a class for .title and .subtitle and .author.

Steven

[JSWolf]

H3 is too small for a chapter title (IMHO).

[Jellby]

I just use <h1> for chapters. If there are parts or higher-level divisions I use <h1 class="part"> or similar. For the book title, author, date, etc. I create a title page with <p class="title">, <p class="author">, etc.

But I create all my ePUBs manually, including styles and NCX, so maybe this solution is not the best for working with Sigil

[amoroso]

Originally Posted by theducks

and Chapters always to H3 , regardless of presence/lack of H2.

Why do you always use H3 for chapters?

[theducks]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

H3 is too small for a chapter title (IMHO).

What are you viewing on?

A H2 "Chapter XX"
just about fills the line on my reader. (Level 3 of 5 Zoom. a tiny bit bigger than the dead tree version paperback text )
put a in sub-title , Which is why I use H3

[capidamonte]

Originally Posted by theducks

I believe in K.I.S.S.

So I set the Title to H1

Any "Parts or Books" as H2

and Chapters always to H3 , regardless of presence/lack of H2.

The TOC will indent properly
Title
Part1
Chapters
Part2
More chapters (those belonging to Part 2)
Partx
. . .

You can still do additional H level styling via the stylesheet

That's exactly how I do it. It makes sense, after all. Multiple "ultimate" headings is illogical and unnecessarily confusing. What's more important than the title, ie, the book itself? Volumes or Parts are obviously next, followed by Chapters, Sections and Subsections. That leaves you H6 for Sub-Subsections, which are pretty rare.

Use all 6 standard headings properly, and style them to suit yourself. I've only had one book that required more levels of organization. (I used <h6 class="h7"> as my header, but there are probably better solutions.)

Workarounds for individual readers aside, anything else is bad structural markup, in my opinion. And even those workarounds bear the danger of becoming accepted (bad) practice.

[shall1028]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

H3 is too small for a chapter title (IMHO).

Hmm... we are being a bit naive aren't we? CSS file excerpt follows:

h1 {font-size: 1.5em;}
h2 {font-size: 2em;}
h3 (font-size: 12em;}

There we go; an H3 that is much larger than an H2 and an H2 that is a bit larger than an H1.

[Hitch]

Well, crap, I don't do anything that fanciful. :-)

I use an h1 title attribute for the ="Title Page," and h1 for my chapters. I use h2 for everything else like acknowledgments, dedications, sub-headers blah-de-dah. If needed, that gives me h3-h6 for everything else. I style the text on the Title Page via css so the title and the author name have enough bang for the buck without worrying about using built in header styles. {shrug}. I'm all about the K.I.S.S.

Hitch

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by shall1028

Hmm... we are being a bit naive aren't we? CSS file excerpt follows:

h1 {font-size: 1.5em;}
h2 {font-size: 2em;}
h3 (font-size: 12em;}

There we go; an H3 that is much larger than an H2 and an H2 that is a bit larger than an H1.

I prefer the default sizes for H1, H2, H3, H4...

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

I prefer the default sizes for H1, H2, H3, H4...

But the default is implementation-specific. You may be satisfied with whatever default you see in ADE, or in the Sony reader... but your next reader could have all H* sizes default to normal text size, for instance, or a default H3 that is way too big for you...