# Explicit section not possible?

**URL:** <https://talk.commonmark.org/t/explicit-section-not-possible/796>\
**Category:** Extensions\
**Created:** [October 9, 2014, 6:31am UTC](https://talk.commonmark.org/t/explicit-section-not-possible/796 "2014-10-09T06:31:01Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 7

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**Author:** ![jgm](https://talk.commonmark.org/user_avatar/talk.commonmark.org/jgm/32/1360_2.png) [@jgm](https://talk.commonmark.org/u/jgm)\
**Post date:** [October 30, 2014, 4:44am UTC](https://talk.commonmark.org/t/explicit-section-not-possible/796/7 "2014-10-30T04:44:24Z")

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+++ Randomstuff [Oct 29 14 22:49]:

> AFAIU, the current spec treats this snippet as a flat AST such as:
> 
> - h1: Foo
> - h2: Bar
> - paragraph: p
> 
> If it was treated as this instead:
> 
> - h1: Foo
> - section
> - h1: Bar
> 
> - paragraph: p
> 
> it would make the hierachiecal interpretation standard instead of relying on the implementation to rebuild the structure from the flat view.

Well, in Markdown these two documents are different:

```auto
# Foo

### Bar
p

```

```auto
# Foo

## Bar
p

```

On your proposal, as I understand it, they’d be parsed into the same AST, so there’d be no way to go back; information would be lost. The problem is that there are multiple flat structures corresponding to a single hierarchical structure.

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