Semantic Title for a Contents Section

Via Twitter, Kristarella asked:

If there was a linked list of heading titles on a blog post, what should it be called? Contents, Jump to Section, Table of Contents… ?

My response was that “Contents” would be the correct title, for the following reasons:

• The linked list of heading titles should be marked-up as an ordered list; it’s not tabular data and so shouldn’t be referred to as a “Table of Contents”. In a printed book it may well be a table of sorts, as each of the titles also have an associated piece of data: the page number (although, technically, it may have been created using leaders – those dots that help guide the eye from the title to the page number).
• If the hyperlinks are for going straight to sections later in the page, then “Jump To Section” may make sense on a web page. However, using a different media (such as the web page being printed out) this may not make sense anymore; obviously on paper, hyperlinks aren’t so useful at moving us straight to a specific section.
  However, one argument against this is that the developer could set print styles such that what’s printed out is different to the web version for use on-screen. By using media-specific styles, the title for this list could appear as “Jump To Section” on screen, and “Contents” on the printed version.

I would still recommend my initial suggestion – using “Contents” is non-media specific, doesn’t imply an action that the user must take, and is descriptive of what the information following it is about.

While this may all seem a pretty picky point, it’s this attention to detail that can show your users that you’ve thought of the different ways in which they might use or interpret the information you’ve provided to them. Will they be confused if one of the other suggested titles was used instead? Probably not, but then why use three words when one word sums it up anyway? In this case, the simplest answer is the best answer.

Tagged as: semantics