By erikmarcus on

I'm new to Drupal and I feel sheepish posting such a basic question. But I spent considerable time checking the forums and the online support materials and haven't gotten anywhere with this issue. Can somebody tell me what the deal is with why Drupal doesn't output h1 through h6 tags to the browser? I've uploaded a document with these tags to my Drupal installation and I find that the tags appear on the stored document on my server, but when Drupal outputs the document to a webpage it omits all these header tags. What's up with that, and how do I fix this problem?

In the research I've done, I've seen that the TinyMCE editor module plus the TinyMCE header plugin might resolve this issue. Would installing and activating these packages give me what I need? If so, I might still be messed up since it appears these packages haven't been released for Drupal 6.0 yet, and I'm running 6.0 RC2 on my server. If I in fact need these packages, can I get them working on 6.0 RC2? I don't have any need for a WYSIWYG editor, but I'll install this if it's the only way I can get Drupal to support different sized Headers.

Apart from wanting to get this fixed, I have a deeper question. I would think that every webmaster and his grandmother would need support for the h1 through h6 tags. I could perhaps understand why support for something so basic might be lacking if Drupal was a 1.0 release. But given the age and maturity of Drupal, I can't understand why it apparently needs add-on modules to do something so basic. I'm not flaming Drupal here. I'm asking this question because I'm betting the answer is that Drupal already offers a graceful way to show different sizes of headers in a web document, and I'm barking up the wrong tree by thinking that h1 through h6 XHTML tags are how this has been implemented.

And one last thing: what's the best online technical reference for a newbie trying to configure a Drupal 6.0 website?

THANKS for any help!

⋅ Categories: Drupal 6.x

Comments

joachim’s picture

joachim commented

I've not used TinyMCE or any of the editors, just the plain input box.

Heading tags aren't allowed in the default Filtered HTML input method. You can easily enable them by configuring the HTML filter in that input method.

The reason they are disable, I presume, is because depending on the node's context, its own title doesn't have the same level heading: a node on a single page has an H1 title, but in a teaser list, it's an H2. And that's only on my particular theme -- a different theme might change this altogether. (I've themed one of the views on my site to give node titles an H3, just to complicate matters.)

So if the editor of a node were to hard-code H2s and H3s, say, you'd get XHTML that was semantically incorrect because the hierarchy of headings would sometimes be incorrect.

This is a considerable limitation, and I've recently been pondering making an input filter that takes wiki syntax headings (== heading ==) and then correctly renders them according to context.
However, I'm not sure how such a module would be able to detect what a theme is doing with the output.