[threatofrain]

Even for text documents... for the love of documents, why wouldn't you have an official table of contents element?

Someone in a nearby thread mentioned custom elements. If we don't agree on meaning then it's not very semantic! Part of the power of agreement on semantics is that the more we have of it, the more we have things like Firefox or Safari's reader mode, which remolds the website to the user's desire.

[dieulot]

What would a specific table of contents element bring over a <nav> inside your <main>/<article>?

(As demonstrated in the first example of https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/sections.html#the-nav...)

[threatofrain]

I'd look to what Wikipedia provides as a document reading experience. The problem with nav is that there weren't enough tags so developers will rightly use them for other things, such as breadcrumbs. I'm looking for exclusive ToC that will allow reader mode to go further.

[extra88]

The heading hierarchy is the table of contents. Rather than some magic that creates a set of anchor links that link to the page's headings, I want browsers to provide what screen readers do, list the headings and let people keyboard navigate to them without site authors having to do anything.

"SkipTo Landmarks & Headings" is a browser extension that somewhat does what I'm describing. It's harder for an extension to handle this smoothly compared to a browser. https://skipto-landmarks-headings.github.io