[whatwg] The IMG element, proposing a CAPTION attribute

[Alexey Feldgendler]

On Thu, 23 Nov 2006 01:28:13 +0600, Michel Fortin <michel.fortin at michelf.com> wrote:

>> I'm not saying it's a caption either. A caption is just one of the
>> possible ways of rendering a title.

> But is a caption limited to a title? Very often, captions contains
> some explanations too. I just opened a computer architecture book
> near me I knew was full of figures and the first figure I spotted had
> a eleven-line caption -- 5 complete sentences.

Anyway, "caption" is presentational. The semantic relation of that text to the figure, if it's not a title, is most probably "description" or "explanation". It's another problem how to express this relation. Probably a generic form of <label for="..."> without "type" attribute should be used -- something like a <div> without specifying any finer semantic role.

> I know not everyone use captions like this. But calling captions
> "title" pose two problems: it clashes in name with the title
> attribute, making both of them a little more ambiguous,

It's intended that they share the name. The content of <label type="title"> *means* the same as the value of "title" attribute. The same goes for <label type="alt"> vs. "alt" attribute.

>> It's not clear for Google Images which needs to extract (image,
>> title) pairs from documents.

> But isn't this a weakness in the table markup? I mean, what if I was
> using this table layout for non-image data instead, should it be done
> any different? Maybe scope="" or some other attributes would be more
> appropriate to express the association.

scope="" does not express the "A is the title of B" relation.

> And I'm not even sure a table is appropriate in this case. Isn't the
> table there for purely presentational reasons?

No, this is really tabular data: a list of painings with specific pieces of data about each (title, artist). <table> is the natural use case for this.


-- 
Alexey Feldgendler <alexey at feldgendler.ru>
[ICQ: 115226275] http://feldgendler.livejournal.com