- From: Jeff Seager <Jeff.Seager@wvdrs.org>
- Date: Mon, 27 Nov 2006 10:15:17 -0500
Dave writes: "To an indexing service, the caption is the single most important thing about an image. By separating the caption from the IMG element, you force the search engine to apply a heuristic of some variety to infer the connection...." "... The indexing service user agent has to make sense of all of this, in order to figure out what caption goes with what image, and it is just going to be extremely difficult to get that with no actual structural relationship between the caption and the image." Well said, Dave! I think this is an understanding that has been (mostly) missing in this discussion. We need a structural and semantic link between caption and image, first and foremost. There will inevitably be all kinds of implementations of this to suit an equal number of purposes, but this is a core need to be met in any future iterations of HTML/XHTML. Without a consistent structural and semantic expression of whatever we call this "caption," the cognitive link between image and caption will be haphazard, at best -- in user agents and in the end user (the audience). Thank you also, Dave, for reminding us that web browsers aren't our only targets. As most of us are probably focused on GUI browsers most of the time, the needs of other media can be swept aside too easily. But they must be considered in the final specifications, so we need to bear them in mind now. Where to go from here? "Title" as currently specified won't do the job for captions because, as Matthew Raymond points out, "a caption is not necessarily 'advisory information'[1], which is what the |title| attribute is defined as containing." But would there be support for broadening the definition of "title" and encouraging its adoption for image captioning? It seems to me that there would be advantages to piggybacking our purpose on an element or attribute already specified, implementing an evolutionary change as opposed to a revolutionary one. So please consider this: What do we lose, semantically or cognitively, even if we entirely discard the "advisory information" capabilities in the "title" attribute? It seems to me we'd lose far less than we may gain in having a proper structure for captions. Existing "titles" may not inform as well as a proper caption, but would probably not be rendered meaningless as such. The ultimate solution should be as simple and direct as possible, I think. I'm just tossing this out for further consideration. I'm also mindful of the previous arguments in favor of allowing markup within captions, which suggests that the caption ought to be an element rather than an attribute. I guess that would be nice, but I'm not sure I agree with the necessity of it. Form follows function, and all that. Jeff Seager
Received on Monday, 27 November 2006 07:15:17 UTC