Re: ISSUE 90 Remove figure element discussion

On Sun, May 2, 2010 at 2:22 PM, Benoit Piette <benoit.piette@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
> I’ve read some of the discussions and the various change proposals on this.
> Here is my opinion on the issue.
>
> The Figure element seems at first look a way to encapsulate an image and its
> caption in a more structural way than a div with an image and a paragraph
> with the image having an aria-labeledby linking the paragraph for
> accessibility.
>
> The figure element can also include diagrams, codes, poems, or anything that
> can be grouped, annotated and maybe could be put outside the main flow of
> the document.
>
> As such, I find the name figure confusing because it can be used for
> something else than a figure / image. The semantic difference between
> figure, aside and details is minimal and I think it might become confusing
> for authors. All of them are grouping elements, figure and aside are related
> to a section / content /page, figure is referred in the document, but not
> aside. Both details and figure have captions / summary, but have different
> default behavior / presentation. What if aside had a caption element?

<details> and <figure> correspond to substantially different things in
real usage.  <details> can be used for a "see more" or a spoiler,
while <figure> is for, well, a <figure>.  We've probably all seen
<figure>s in scientific papers or tutorial books, and they're actually
used quite a bit in both scientific and pop culture magazines, though
they might not be captioned explicitly with the term "figure".  The
substantial difference in presentation/interaction between <details>
and <figure> will ensure that they don't get confused more than once
by a novice author.

<aside> and <figure> are indeed closer - they're just gradations of
tangentialness.  But still, I think it will be relatively easy to use
them correctly.  Most of the time, <aside> will be outside of the text
of the article, marking parts of a website that aren't directly
relevant, while <figure> will be used inside the text of the article.
The occasional places where you would use <aside> within an article,
such as to mark up a pull-quote, won't suffer too bad if they're
miscoded as a <figure> instead.  The semantics are close enough that
those sorts of uses can go either way without much harm.


> I am not sure of the usability of those elements. Their use will probably
> depend on the usefulness of their default presentation / behavior and the
> impact they could have on SEO and such. They don’t bring much value to the
> table and there is a good chance they might be misused. I would like to know
> the impact on accessibility that a figure element is misused? If figure is
> used instead of aside, or even article…

I doubt it would be misused in that manner.  Marking up a <figure> as
an <aside>, or the reverse, won't do too much damage.  Any other mixup
seems extremely unlikely to me, since it would require a complete
misunderstanding of the names, in addition to ignoring every tutorial
and example on the net.


> Is figure only useful to add presentation to a grouping element or does it
> have real semantic value? If the reason to have figure is to force a caption
> element to a group so that assistive technology can use it to give better
> accessibility, then maybe a similar element that can be used on any grouping
> element would be a better idea.

The semantic value is stated right in the spec, and you even allude
directly to it earlier in your email.  It represents an element which
is part of the content, but whose exact position in the content is
unimportant, and which may have a caption providing additional
explanation.


> As such, I am not sure if the figure element is really useful. I could
> definitely live without it. On blogs, long documents and articles it can
> have its place, elsewhere… meh.

Luckily, those are precisely the uses it's designed for.  ^_^


> A small question: In a slideshow of product photos in an e-commerce web
> site, would figure be the correct element to use? Could a caption describe
> (or label) many images?

Yeah, that's fine.

~TJ

Received on Sunday, 2 May 2010 23:08:19 UTC