So <HGROUP> Is Back In HTML 5, And Dumb As Ever!

Well over a decade ago when the WhatWG was first working on HTML 5 they introduced the <hgroup> tag to group together numbered headings for things like title and tagline. This immediately raised the ire of people who understood HTML semantics since putting H1+H2 together that way is ignorant broken nonsense. Many — myself included — took it as proof — alongside acceptance of <embed> into the spec, their new <aside> tag that had nothing to do with grammatical/literary asides and instead indicated presentation, the pointless <video> and <audio> that were redundant to <object> — that the people creating HTML 5 didn’t know enough about HTML 4 to be making its successor.

Because this:

<hgroup>
  <h1>Site Title</h1>
  <h2>TagLine</h2>
</hgroup>

Is ignorant incompetent dumbass rubbish if you understand that a H1 is the (singular) headING (singular) that all H2 on the page mark the start of subsections of. The first H2 on a page marking the start of the main content if you don’t use <main>. H3 mark the start of a subsection of the H2 preceding it and so forth. They do not mean fonts in different weights and sizes, they establish a navigable document structure with landings. A concept very important for users of screen readers and braille readers, as well as for search engines.

For this reason it was made “obsolete” almost as fast as HTML 5 was adopted by the W3C when they shelved their own plans. Yes, they did have their own plan before the WhatWG beat them to it. And that’s the thing, “obsolete” as in “do not use, browser support might disappear entirely” and not “‘deprecated” as in “do not use”. Gah, deprecated, another example of the W3C using the wrong word. We’re not talking down to those tags like they were petulant children.

So How And Why Is It Back?

Well, it looks like they tried — and failed — to fix it. It no longer only accepts numbered headings as its children, and in fact now only accepts ONE such heading. For further heading lines, you’re to use Paragraphs… and ONLY paragraphs.