Should the [headers] and [footers] tags be merged?

Question

While browsing this question, I noticed that it included both the [headers] and [footers] tags. This seems to me to be unnecessary duplication - in the context of word processing and documents, headers and footers work nearly identically and it is very difficult to imagine a question that would require just one of these tags.

I know that there are other types of headers, such as email headers and function headers, but it seems to me that these should probably be different tags as they are not really related to the header of a document (or each other).

So, my proposal is, merge the existing [headers] and [footers] tag into a [headers/footers] tag or similar, and if it is deemed necessary that email headers and function headers have their own tags, they should be created separately.

Answer 1

I think you're on the right track. Looking through the questions, there's quite a variety of usage, most of which probably would benefit from a more specific tag. The majority seem to fall in these categories:

• [page-header-footer]
• [email-header]
• [file-header]
• [header-connector] (hardware)

There are some others I'm not familiar enough with:

• [header-file] (see How can I use older gcc headers? and a few others)
• [kernel-header]
• various communication/data transfer headers (HTTP, IP, SSH, etc.); would something like [protocol-header] cover those?
• There's a section header usage in programming.
• There are several multi-media questions that mention global headers.

I noticed several questions that refer to column/table headings, which doesn't need a tag.

I'll post this as a starting point. People can feel free to tweak it to create a list of the specific tags needed.