[whatwg] several messages about <figure> and related subjects

[Charles McCathieNevile]

On Tue, 26 Feb 2008 06:16:15 +0100, Maciej Stachowiak <mjs at apple.com>  
wrote:

> On Feb 25, 2008, at 2:42 PM, Ian Hickson wrote:
>
>>   <label>
>>      This would preclude any sane way of putting form controls in
>>      legends, which would be bad.
>>      This can't be fixed in the spec.
>
> Is the ability to put form controls in figure captions (let alone more  
> than one form control) really more important than ability to style them  
> sanely? Putting a form control in a figure caption seems unlikely to me.

What would you recommend for the "am I hot or not" and the like? At first  
glance, that seems like a reasonable use case to me.

...
>> A new element would be a neat solution, but frankly I'm out of words to
>> use, and if we keep adding new ways to mark up titles and captions and
>> legends and labels, authors aren't going to be able to work out when  
>> they should use each element...
>
> It seems to me that the problems with adding a new element are purely  
> aesthetic, while the problems with reusing 'legend' are practical and  
> harm deployment of the new element.

Agreed.

>> I think our only option is to use <legend>, and, while in the migration
>> period, have people use markup like:
>>
>>   <figure>
>>     <legend><span class="legend"> ... </span></legend>
>>     ...
>>   </figure>
>>
>> ...with styles like:
>>
>>   figure > legend, figure > .legend { ... }
>
> Yuck. Surely writing <legend><span class="legend"> ... </span></legend>  
> is uglier than writing something like <figcaption> ... </figcaption>.  
> And the migration period could take more than a decade. Given the  
> lengths that HTML5 goes to so that it can degrade gracefully, this  
> sounds like a high price to pay to avoid adding an element.

cheers

chaals

-- 
Charles McCathieNevile  Opera Software, Standards Group
     je parle français -- hablo español -- jeg lærer norsk
http://my.opera.com/chaals   Try Opera 9.5: http://snapshot.opera.com