[Bug 8404] Refocus the figure element back to being a figure

http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=8404





--- Comment #39 from Shelley Powers <shelleyp@burningbird.net>  2009-12-01 05:38:15 ---
(In reply to comment #38)
> Here is another example of a table as a figure, this time with real data, not
> fake data meant for illustrative purposes:
> http://books.google.com/books?id=QbdMOM89qv0C&lpg=PA555&dq=%22table%20in%20figure%22&lr=&pg=PA556#v=onepage&q=%22table%20in%20figure%22&f=false
> 
> I can produce literally tens of examples of these without trying.  This is
> *precisely* the usage as currently defined in the spec.
> 
> I pulled a single programming book out of my bookshelf (one about machine
> learning) and found dozens of code snippets given and labeled as figures.  The
> book contains literally hundreds of data tables given as figures (they are
> labeled as "Table 1.1", etc, but they display identical semantics to the code
> and diagrams that are labeled explicitly as figures).
> 
> Whether or not this is a common idiom is not up for discussion.  It is a plain
> fact that it is, as literally just a few minutes of searching turns up a large
> number of examples.
> 
> Figures are *not* merely for illustrative purposes, though that is certainly a
> common use of them.  The current descriptive text in the spec aligns pretty
> much precisely with the full common usage of figures - as information that is
> part of the content but can be moved from its document position without
> affecting the meaning of the document.
> 

But you're taking these examples out of context. A figure in a book is nothing
more than a piece of a page -- it is the context that gives it meaning; that
tells the reader whether the data is illustrative or meaningful. 

You're finding examples in books where the figure is a meaningful table. We
don't know, though, whether the author used "Figure" for the table, because the
book has no concept of a formal Table element, to differentiate the item, or if
the table, though meaningful, wasn't a scan from another book that was
included, literally, as a figure in the book. 

So how do we differentiate a table that's for illustrative purposes in a
figure, from one that isn't illustrative and the data should be parsed and
loaded into the DOM? Do we want every table in every figure element to be
loaded into the DOM? 

So what is a figure then? If it's not illustration, or not anything special, is
it, as Lief stated, nothing more than a way of attaching a caption of to a lump
of markup? 


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Received on Tuesday, 1 December 2009 05:38:18 UTC