Re: Bug 8404 -- taking it to the lists

On Tue, Dec 1, 2009 at 9:31 AM, Laura Carlson
<laura.lee.carlson@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Leif,
>
> You wrote to Tab [1]:
>
>> What you did not prove anywhere, is that people will *not* have a
>> difficult time understanding what <figure> is about.
>
> I did a little bit of searching and found some definitions, style
> guides, and examples.
[snip giant list]

Thanks for the research, Laura!  Much appreciated.

It seems somewhat odd that, despite all the styleguides implicitly
forbidding using code in figures and explicitly forbidding tables in
figures, that such uses are still as common as they are.  This may
indicate that it is in fact more natural to use figures in the broader
sense that the spec currently defines, and that attempting to limit it
to the definition implied by the styleguides would be
counterproductive, as authors would just ignore it and use it as they
see in current books and magazine articles.

(I also note that many of the guides forbidding using a table as a
figure are merely forbidding it from being *labeled* as a figure - I
doubt they're requiring that they not be styled and treated otherwise
as a figure.  Even in books that I own that do explicitly label
table-figures as "Table 1.2" or what-have-you, the styling and meaning
of the table is identical to that of other figures.)

~TJ

Received on Tuesday, 1 December 2009 15:54:47 UTC