Reading Eric Meyer's commentary on Header tags just confirms the fact that we're all waiting around for the next move in markup so that there is something new to talk about.
Leave my headers alone.
I just wonder what seems so difficult — in visual design, headers are often defined by text size and weight, giving the reader the ability to understand the heirarchy of information at a glance.
Of course, visually, I can set type sizes and so forth with CSS and without any particular tags — using header tags, to me, is to establish the document heirarchy to machines, or also so that browsers that don't understand the styles can visually establish the heirarchy to the client.
So what's with all this talk of keeping them in order, or nesting them, or establish a set of rules to govern the use of them, or a standard of heirarchy, or whatever? Why must we adhere to a set structure that emphasizes anal markup habits where in fact the heirarchy ought to be based on the information that is contained in the documents we are handling?
I think the structure nuts take it too far sometimes, but I guess that's their right. Separating content from layout and structure is an admirable goal, but in the end, the content is the most important thing, and the markup and structure has to be flexible enough to suit any type of document structure we may need it for. You can structure your document any way you like — there's no need to establish a set of arbitrary rules to make everybody else do it the same way.