Re: Bug 8404 -- taking it to the lists

On Tue, Dec 1, 2009 at 8:45 AM, Tab Atkins Jr. <jackalmage@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 1, 2009 at 8:38 AM, Leif Halvard Silli
> <xn--mlform-iua@xn--mlform-iua.no> wrote:
>> What you did not prove anywhere, is that people will *not* have a
>> difficult time understanding what <figure> is about.
>
> It was not my intention to do so; I was merely trying to shoot down a
> particular wrong justification I saw being bandied about.
>
> That being said, I don't think people will have any trouble with it.
> The spec is quite clear, and the definition of the element matches
> extremely well with what we call "figures" in books and articles
> today.  Tutorials should have an easy time explaining it, since they
> can just point to a magazine article as an example of a figure.
>
>> Shelley, as a solution, suggests refocusing <figure> to only allow
>> graphics, media elements and foreign content (svg/math) and some more.
>
> Indeed, and she used as justification a statement that figures are, in
> common use, only used for captioning illustrations.  I showed that to
> be trivially false; it is very common to put code and tables in
> figures.
>
> ~TJ
>


Actually, your examples did demonstrate that figure is almost
invariably used for illustration. The first two examples you gave were
illustrative, and I believe the third you provided was embedded in a
figure in the book because it was a scanned copy from another source
and added to the book as an image (typographical differences). Most
book company templates only allow external images within elements
designated as "figure".

Oh, there will be exceptions, but there will always be exceptions in
everything. We cannot hope to include every possible exception in
HTML5 and expect to have a usable spec, and one that ever finishes.
But generally, and strongly so, figures are illustration.

However, not all illustrations are graphical in nature, and therein
lies the disconnect between illustration and function, particularly
when it comes to a "table".

Shelley

Received on Tuesday, 1 December 2009 14:51:17 UTC