Re: aside and figure elements

On Mon, Jun 7, 2010 at 9:14 AM, Laura Carlson
<laura.lee.carlson@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Shelley,
>
>>> The alt attribute must be provided regardless of figcaption, as figure
>>> is defined now.
>>
>> Good catch Shelley. Okay, how about restricting it to:
>>
>> When a figure has an image as sole content use a  <figcaption> as the
>> accessible name for the image. But in scenarios of multiple images in
>> a figure element alt rules apply.
>
> Another option would be to restrict figure to just images and forget
> it as a grouping mechanism.

That's unacceptable.  You and others have cited style guides that
apparently forbid the use of tables and other non-image elements in
figures, but in the original discussions about this issue many
examples were shown where tables, code examples, poems, etc were all
used in things that were labelled as figures, or at least displayed in
an identical way to figures (in some cases, frex, the tables were
labeled with "Table 1" rather than "Figure 1", but other than that
small difference the tables and images were treated and styled
identically).  I cannot emphasize how common these examples are, and
how trivial it was to find them using a simple search.

So, regardless of style guide advice, it is clear that in common usage
many things are used as "figures" beyond just images.  It would be a
disservice to authors to pretend that there's a significant difference
when they (authors) clearly do not believe there is.  It would just
invite either "misuse" of <figure> (using it for things other than
images anyway) or less-than-ideal markup (using <div
class=figure><table>...</table></div> without any special
accessibility markup).

~TJ

Received on Monday, 7 June 2010 18:08:18 UTC