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Time and time again, I see people who use <section> where it shouldn't be used. Almost in all cases, the outline would make sense if all <section> tags would be removed from the markup. Clearly, this is a bug in the spec. I see patterns where people wrap parts of the page in <section> without having headings for them, which creates untitled sections in the outline. Making <section> without a heading not affect the outline would fix this; dropping <section> would fix this; evang to use <div> instead might fix this to some extent. Making the spec not discourage use of <div> and give examples for when to use it might help. I see patterns where people wrap the contents between the <header> and the <footer> (if footer is present) of an <article> in a <section>. Making <section> without a heading not affect the outline would *not* fix this because the article might have sub headings further down. Dropping <section> would fix this. Restricting the content models to somehow catch this case might fix this. Introducing a <content> element might help.
Actually, I think there has been so much talk about the "evils" of div, that people use section when a div would be the better choice. I've seen quite a lot of comments that say "section basically is a more semantic div", which is partly true, but not the whole truth. I think we need to convey this message: If in doubt whether section is the better choice than div, use div, since at least the damage done will be less. (I see an article forming: "Overuse of section considered harmful"... Argh!) An analogy would be when we first learned that *em* is better than *i*, since it was semantic, and people started to use em, even though the text actually was not supposed to be emphasized. If there was one pedagogic value to XHTML 2 in this regard, it was that it did away with h1-h6 in favor of the generic h-element. This approach made it clear to readers exactly how sections did work. Now, I am not arguing that we should go down the XHTML 2 route. I am only trying to explain some aspects that I think could be useful in fixing this bug, which is pedagogic in nature. Would this be a good rule of thumb? Each section SHOULD contain exactly one heading (except subtitles), preferably as the first child element of the section. If no heading can be applied in such a way, one SHOULD use another element than section.
Over the past week or two there's been a lot of work to try to address this by tweaking text in the spec, adding a boatload of examples, having evang articles, etc. We should probably see if that helps before making more changes. If there are still problems in a few weeks, please feel free to reopen this bug, ideally with examples showing the confusion so that I can study it in detail.