- From: Robert J Burns <rob@robburns.com>
- Date: Mon, 9 Feb 2009 02:08:23 -0600
- To: HTML WG <public-html@w3.org>
On Feb 9, 2009, at 1:17 AM, bugzilla@wiggum.w3.org wrote: > > http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=6543 > > Summary: Mint a new element for figure captions > Product: HTML WG > Version: unspecified > Platform: PC > OS/Version: All > Status: NEW > Severity: normal > Priority: P2 > Component: Spec proposals > AssignedTo: dave.null@w3.org > ReportedBy: hsivonen@iki.fi > QAContact: public-html-bugzilla@w3.org > CC: ian@hixie.ch, mike@w3.org, public-html@w3.org > > > Currently, HTML 5 specifies that the caption for <figure> is > represented by the > <legend> element. Unfortunately, the <legend> element implies a > <fieldset> in > the HTML parser in already shipped and installed instances of Gecko. > If > <legend> is used, this is a rather notable barrier for author > adoption of > <figure> even if the generation of implied fieldset were removed in > a future > release. > > Furthermore, the <legend> element comes with form-related DOM > baggage: the > HTMLLegendElement interface from DOM Level 2 HTML. > > Since <caption> is also legacy-encumbered, I suggest minting a new > element to > remove the adoption barriers for <figure> and its caption. > > Since the English thesaurus has been exhausted, I suggest minting a > new element > name that has some qualifying prefix for the word "caption": e.g. > <figcaption>. > (I'm assuming here that <rubric> wouldn't be appropriate.) Since it seems "caption" is really the word we're looking for, but legacy parsing wants caption to be properly placed in a table, why not simply make a legacy synonym element to the figure element as has been suggested in the past[1]. With this approach, the parsing algorithm could be updated to permit 'caption' elements in "figure" elements in addition to the "table" element. In the meantime, authors can use: <table f > <caption>some caption text</caption> <tr><td><img src='uri' alt='alt text' > </table> in the same way they will eventually use <figure> <caption>some caption text</caption> <img src='uri' alt='alt text' > </figure> in all XML parsed HTML and HTML5 parsed text/html in the future. Note the use of the "f" boolean minimized attribute to indicate this is a figure element and almost the same character count in the legacy compatible approach as the figure example. With this approach authors get immediate CSS support for figures that I expect behaves much the way we would want the figure caption to behave. figure, table[f] {caption-side: bottom; } or figure, table[f] {caption-side: top; } Sure it's a little contrived in the interim, but there's a lot in HTML5 that's a little contrived. And it works today! Take care, Rob [1]: <http://esw.w3.org/topic/HTML/InterimLegacyBridgingMarkup> ps, I'll ad this to bugzilla, but I think its worth discussing in the broader WG
Received on Monday, 9 February 2009 08:13:41 UTC