Can I use h2 without using h1?

[PowerUp]

I intend to use CSS to control my h1 and h2 attributes. h1 will be my chapter title. h2 will be my sub heading.

On my 1st page of my story, I have h1 and h2. Then it continues on page 2. Can I use h2 only on my second page without using h1? Does this have any effect on Search Engine or will it confuse the bots?

[kiwibrit]

I would use the same h1 on each page. But, for pages following on from the first, perhaps style h1 with an id that shows the heading has been inherited.

Or simply put the h1 on a different background colour from the rest of the page.

[pmkpmk]

From a strict syntactical point of view - the one the W3C also uses - there can only be one H1 element per page, and a page without any H1 is syntactically incorrect.
From a webmaster/SEO point of view, there are hints that this might be a factor (among many, many others) in ranking as well.

With CSS you can make the headings appear as you wish. On one of my sites I styled H1 and H2 to look exactly the same, yet there is only one H1 with the most relevant headlines and all the others are H2's.

[Matt Probert]

Can I use h2 only on my second page without using h1? Does this have any effect on Search Engine or will it confuse the bots?

Yes you can use h2 or any other heading tags as you wish.

No it wont confuse any robots, and even if it did, so what? Your site is for the benefit of readers, not computers?

Matt

[kiwibrit]

Well, if you don't want to carry forward the h1 form the first page, why on earth not make the premium heading on the next h1 in its own right? It can be styled for consistency with h2 on the first page, using an appropriate class.

[PowerUp]

Hi all, thank you for your replies. The reason why i want to use h2 and not h1 on my second page is because h1 is reserved for my chapter title, h2 is for the subtitles. since the chapter spans more than one page, so there will only be h1 on the first page, and a few more subtitles on the following pages.

[tedster]

I have several similar situations and I still use h1 on every page. I put the chapter title in there on the first page and the subtitles on the following pages.

Here's the way I look at it. Semantically, the subtitle for that section pf the chapter IS the title of the inner page, so I want the mark-up to reflect that. I also want to reflect the actual chapter title somewhere on the inner pages for the sake of clear visitor information. So I set up a class for a "prehead" that can hold the title without disturbing the semantic hierarchy that places the PAGE title in the <h1> element.

<p class="prehead">Title</p>
<h1>Subtitle</h1>