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

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





--- Comment #21 from Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com>  2009-11-30 23:47:37 ---
(In reply to comment #18)
> (In reply to comment #16)
> > I should note by the way that I was in agreement with Shelley's opinion that a
> > figure can only be an image  until this morning when I studied a large number
> > of examples from the various science, engineering and social science textbooks
> > I have around, as well as samples of academic papers, and practical programming
> > books. Seeing how figures are used in practice convinced me that they need a
> > very broad content model.
> > 
> 
> I don't think it's a good idea, though, to allow the exceptions to guide what
> is default behavior. 
> 
> Remember there's nothing with refocusing figure back to images that doesn't
> preclude people also including an HTML table when they need a table. But they
> would embed the table directly in the content, rather than a figure. 

I think if you're converting an article from some source form (say LaTeX or
DocBook) to HTML, then you should be able to use <figure> for anything that was
a figure in your source format.

> 
> As the publication you showed demonstrated, figures are treated separately from
> code examples, and from tables. By simplifying figure, we're not precluding
> people from using what has existed for years: tables and code. 

Indeed, tables are usually (though not always) treated separately from images.
But I found many examples of source code being presented as a figure and
labeled as such.


> In point of fact, HTML tables are a bit of a problem with the ebook industry,
> but the tools are improving. And code samples have their own elements, with
> their own captions, and their own reference: Example 1, Example 2, and so on.

That's not always the case. I've never seen the Example 1 / Example 2 numbering
in a computer science paper, but I have seen Figure 1 / Figure 2 used to label
code samples that are out of the normal flow.

> So I don't think that restricting figure to svg, canvas, img, object, video,
> and pre, would be an onerous burden on the scientific book community. 

I think it would. You should be able to convert LaTeX or DocBook to HTML and
still be able to generate a valid list of tables and figures from the resulting
HTML.


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Received on Monday, 30 November 2009 23:47:47 UTC