Primary and Secondary links headings are hard coded

Agreed.

Once #410646: "Secondary menu" exists but is no longer the default source for the secondary links lands, the pre-render of the menu lists (with their odd headings) will be in one place, and fixing this up will be nice and possible.
I guess by inspecting variable_get('menu_main_links_source', 'main-menu'), variable_get('menu_secondary_links_source', 'user-menu') ?

We didn't notice this weirdness before because all the themes (except Stark) visually hid the hard-coded meaningless menu titles with 'element-invisible'. Hooray for accessibility!

So the "all in one place" part of #410646: "Secondary menu" exists but is no longer the default source for the secondary links didn't happen; I guess that would have to happen here then, as a prerequisite for doing this sanely? (Or, we could leave it in page.tpl.php and just add more code there; ugly, but effective.)

***

If we try the "all in one place" thing here, note that the previous patch in that issue had created two separate theme variables, but I think that's problematic because that means if you want to alter something you have to alter it twice. We'd probably rather want to do that with "D7-style" delayed rendering, i.e. something like:

$variables['main_links'] = array(
  '#theme' => 'links__system_main_links',
  '#links' => menu_main_menu(),
  '#attributes' => array(
    'class' => array('links', 'main-links'),
  ),
  '#heading' => array(
    'text' => t('Main menu'), // Replace this with the dynamic title we add here
    'level' => 'h2',
    'class' => array('element-invisible'),
  ),
);

Then page templates can do print render($main_links) but the links can still be altered before rendering by modifying the $variables['main_links']['#links'] array.

In fairness, this theming code was done in the page.tpl.php file in D6 also (an argument for pushing to D8?), although not quite as ugly as in D7, and as far as I know the link headings did not exist.

***

Related issue: #698014: Theme settings for main/secondary variables mismatch with menu settings - there I tried making the heading "Main navigation links" as part of an overall terminology change, which at least is an improvement although not as good as doing it dynamically as proposed here.

It's nice to know that there is a tighter way to do that rendering.
print render($main_links)
Would be better than the in-page crud we have now, and is better than my pee-cooked string (d6 style) attempt too

Render ftw!

subscribing

sub

I'm all for adding more meaning to the headings. I do think we should be able to fix this in 7, but it sounds like it can come in a maintenance patch to enhance accessibility after release.

Hm. Looking into this more, I'm not so convinced we want to change those headings to be dynamic after all.

Primary/secondary links are just a list of links. They are derived from "skimming" the top set of links off of a menu, but they are not themselves a complete menu. And currently (unlike when a menu is displayed in a block) we never display the menu title to anyone within the primary/secondary links.

So if we start making it display to screen readers, that could have unexpected results. For example, the menu title might be something that only makes sense to administrators and that they never intended or expected an end user to see (!).

The way it is now is indeed confusing, but I think that's just a duplicate of #698014: Theme settings for main/secondary variables mismatch with menu settings. With that issue, we would switch to having the headings say something like "main links" and "secondary links" (rather than "main menu" and "secondary menu") which would accurately describe to screen readers what they are and their relation to the overall site. Currently, the headings are very confusing, but correct - because Drupal 7 is using the phrases "main menu" and "secondary menu" to refer to these links in the admin interface also. I don't think we can fix them in isolation.

Sounds like a great issue to think through for D8!

Thanks for looking at this with a fresh perspective.

Marking as duplicate of #1079010: The secondary links heading, "Secondary menu", is wrong

It still would be great to do the second thing that was discussed in this issue too (get these hardcoded headings out of the page.tpl.php file and into somewhere where they can be altered more sanely).

I created #1539004: Remove random PHP function calls and logic (other than render() and hide()) from all core tpl.php files as an issue where this could happen.