Pretty Persistent IDentifiers (PPID)

If you're into archival stuf, you've probably come across the concept of PIDs. PIDs help organisations attribute data to consistently identified objects. There are different PID-schemes. Books can be persistently be identified by their ISBN. In science, DOIs are popular to identify scientific articles. And there are plenty of other persistent identifiers.

What most of them share is the following: they need registration. And while that could be a good thing, I've seen well meant attempts at creating a PID where the central entity went rogue, links are dependent on some centralised resolver and it all falls apart.

The requirements

When I was tasked to create a long lasting QR label the requirements were clear:

• The basis had to be a URL (QR Codes can contain anything, but URLs deliver the best UX)
• It should have a fallback: the url should not be a meaningless string; it should at least contain an identifier i…

Headings in sections

Some observations on headings in sections elements in HTML.

Below demonstrates that the h1-element adjusts it's appearance level based on the section element. This is conform the standard. It is behaving like the h-element as I remember it being proposed with XHTML2. When inspecting the attributes in Firefox's accessibility inspector, however, the level attribute is still equal to the element's number. Also, this increase in appeared header-level doesn't change for h2-elements and up.

Example

h1 in div-element h2 in div-element h3 in div-element

h1 in section-element Not all h1 are equal h2 in section-element Notice how the h2 is like the h1 within the section h3 in section-element

Code pen of this example

So what?

• Why isn't the level as reported in the accessibility increased to match the appearance?
• Why aren't the other heading elements affected?
• Why did HTML5 not defin…

Semantics before anything else

My first rule in styling websites or applications is to style semantics over anything else.

1. First use as much of the agreed upon tags and properties that the latest HTML spec gives you
2. Extend this with microformats or schema.org-vocabularies and what else you can find that is an (pseudo-)standard for semantic markup
3. Finally, if no matching semantically rich descriptors can be found, try to think of future proof names for your elements that may be reusable. Think "metadata div(vision)”, "(search) result" (you may style result here and add another more specific styling for search results).

Style the semantical markup. Semantics is about meaning, and by defining your content's meaning in html and highlighting this meaning with your style brings you consistency from the start. This is not only nice to you as a maintainer of code, but also to your audience. It leads to consistent, predictable behaviors.

The counter movem…