Today the w3c announced the addition of the H1N1 tag to the HTML 5 standard. Apparently this is part of the new “semantic web”. You should use this tag when discussing the flu, or common worse-than-just-a-cold illnesses. I think this will especially help blind and vision impaired users because they can’t quickly scan a page like we can and thus aren’t able to avoid potentially harmful content. They will be able to set their browsers to stay clear of the H1N1 content so they aren’t exposed to it.

People die or at least become ill every day from over-exposure to H1N1 content. Symptoms include constant temperature taking, obsessive washing of the hands, hyperventilating when someone sneezes nearby and the weird compulsion to sneeze into one’s elbow instead of one’s hand (making it absolutely impossible to wash off the germs that you sneeze out).

The w3 feels it will help protect people if all H1N1 content is quarantined. It will help contain the spread of this content throughout the web, and give users a way to better deal with this content. The w3 can be hard to follow sometimes, so I will sum up their recommendation below:

4.4.12 The H1N1 Element

The h1n1 element is a heading.

The first element of heading content in an element of sectioning content represents the heading for that section. Sections pertaining to and related to over-exposed and over-hyped disease and illness related topics should be quarantined by the h1n1 tag so as to allow users to deal with the content in a way of their choosing.

The level attribute, if present, must be a valid integer giving the fear inducing level of the content. The higher the level, the greater danger to users the content represents. User generated content should be treated as level 10 by default. News media content should be treated as level 6 or higher. Medical websites are at least a level 3. Scientific journals, since no one reads them and no one can understand them, are eligible for level 1 ranking.

For example, the following is correct:

<h1n1 level=”10″>
    <h1>OMG THE SWINE FLU IS GOING TO KILL US ALL</h1>
    <p>My brother’s sisters mom has a daughter who is in daycare and they had to shut down the whole day care because everyone was DIEING from swine flu. The swine flu will kill you because it turns you into a PIG!!!! YOU GET IT FROM PIGS AND YOU SHOULDN’T EAT PORK EVAR!</p>
</h1n1>

Here is a link to the full w3c recommendation.