- From: David Walbert <dwalbert@learnnc.org>
- Date: Tue, 28 Nov 2006 09:34:31 -0500
On Nov 27, 2006, at 10:39 PM, Michel Fortin wrote: To me, a figure contains illustrative content attached to a document. It may be an image, a code sample, or a snippet of another document used as an example. I think it's important we do not try to narrow too much what can and what cannot be contained in a figure; that's the job of the author do decide. On Nov 28, 2006, at 1:13 AM, fantasai wrote: Some examples of this kind of usage, albeit without the captions: http://www.mozilla.org/contribute/writing/markup#notes In principle, I see your point, but I don't see that such broadly defined figures would have widespread practical value. A "figure" in print publishing traditionally referred to anything that couldn't be normally typeset, but in practice that usually referred to images, charts/graphs ( which in HTML would be inserted as images also), and tables (which in HTML have their own structure and markup). A "figure" in HTML seems to me to serve the same purpose: to denote and describe illustrative content that cannot itself be marked up with HTML. The example from mozilla.org doesn't require any special container element, because it needs no caption. The set-aside text is an example of what's being discussed in the surrounding text, and the heading "example" serves perfectly well to explain that. Once we say that plain text can be a "figure," I'm not sure what meaning "figure" really has any longer; it could be almost anything. And if it could be almost any piece of text that the author feels is an aside, it will have no semantic consistency, and will then be functionally no different from <div>. Additionally, one of the main reasons to include an element for image captioning is machine-based indexing, and if the figure is plain text in the page, that isn't a problem. I think that this broad notion of a "figure" is quite clever but frankly too clever for the typical person using HTML. It requires a level of editorial decision-making that I fear will confuse more authors than it helps, and confused authors make a confusing web. ----- David Walbert LEARN NC, UNC-Chapel Hill dwalbert at learnnc.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.whatwg.org/pipermail/whatwg-whatwg.org/attachments/20061128/0e9db933/attachment.htm>
Received on Tuesday, 28 November 2006 06:34:31 UTC