Two more things.
I’ve dissected quite a number a themes and I noticed those having the date before the post title (and supposedly using the_date tag which displays only once per day, even if more posts!) – will use
h2 Date
h3 post title.
Which makes sense from a structural (semantic?) point of view.
The other thing. I was struggling recently with the same dilemma while transferring some content from an old site to a new, WP powered version. In the old version there were a lot of articles, academic papers – all on a separate html file, and having h1, h2, h3 structure in them.
Now, when transferring them to the WP site I had to decide whether to keep the original or to make it “sub-ordinate” to the general WP page structure. I went with this latter solution. Meaning no h1 or h2 in the papers.
Just my $0.02
