Re: Bug 8404 -- taking it to the lists

Shelley Powers, Tue, 1 Dec 2009 08:50:43 -0600:
> On Tue, Dec 1, 2009 at 8:45 AM, Tab Atkins Jr.:
>> On Tue, Dec 1, 2009 at 8:38 AM, Leif Halvard Silli
>>> What you did not prove anywhere, is that people will *not* have a
>>> difficult time understanding what <figure> is about.

>>> 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.

> 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".

I have a book about Java. Its table of contents starts like this:

* Table of contents
* List of all figures  [ Above 100 figures]
* List of all programs [ Above 100 code examples ]
* List of all tables   [ Above 50-60 tables]

All 3 - figure, program, table - could be labeled as "figure", 
according to the current HTML 5 draft. And they are also all laid out 
very much the same way in the book, with the same styling of the 
caption. So it would be quite logical to use the same wrapper for all, 
and the same caption element for all. 

If, instead of that confusing word "figure", we had a combined 
figure/caption element that one could add to whatever element one 
wants, then authors could themselves add classes to the caption 
element, to show what kind of unit the - ah - figure is. Then it would 
also be possible to - logically and simply - use it for images/photos.
--
leif halvard silli

Received on Tuesday, 1 December 2009 16:20:17 UTC