I am actually going to change my mind.  My thought process for this is as follows

The header should be treated as a h3 styled tag.  Remember some markup does not just apply style but also meaning, such as structure of a webpage.  We still want this treated as an h3 tag, however it is not emphasized normally and thus is purposed with the small tag.  Think of it as a modifier for the tag purpose that is implicitly implied through the tagname.  Why not just use a header tag with a different styling such as h4 for example to possibly mimic the small tag style behavior.  My conclusion was it did not follow the intended structing reasoning behind why to use h3 tag to begin with.