Re: Alternate proposals for ISSUE-83

On Thu, Jan 14, 2010 at 5:59 PM, Jonas Sicking <jonas@sicking.cc> wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 14, 2010 at 3:51 PM, Aryeh Gregor <Simetrical+w3c@gmail.com> wrote:
>> I definitely prefer either C or D.  <fltcap> is hard to understand,
>> and using an attribute here is weird.  Of the two, I can definitely
>> see the argument for D, but I'm not sure the extra elements are worth
>> it, so I'm undecided.
>
> What is the argument for wrapping the body in an element, rather than
> assuming that everything that isn't in the <fcaption>/<dlable> is the
> body.
>
> The argument against it is that fewer elements is author friendly
> since it's less for them to type out/send across the wire. It also
> removes the risk that people will forget or not bother with the
> body-wrapping element.

The argument for is that we authors are very commonly going to have to
style the body of either element in such a way as will require a
wrapper element anyway.  Minting an (optional) blessed element to use
as such a container makes things a bit more natural and easy than
using a classed <div>.

It also has a moderately pleasing (to me, at least) parallel with
<tbody>, which serves the same purpose of being an optional wrapper
for the body contents of the table.  Styling opportunities with
<tbody> are fewer due to the limitations imposed by the table
formatting model, but it still finds plenty of use in my CSS.  I used
it just today to cleanly apply a border to just the <td>s in the body
of a stats table, avoiding the placeholder <td> in the <thead>
(serving just to take up a cell in the upper-left, as the table had
both row and column headers).

~TJ

~TJ

Received on Friday, 15 January 2010 00:17:19 UTC