[whatwg] <figure><img><* caption>
Nikita Popov
privat at ni-po.com
Tue Dec 1 06:33:28 PST 2009
> The original idea for using the attribute was that it could apply to a
> wide range of elements, like p, div, etc. But that makes it difficult
> for browsers to provide sensible default styling for captions, since
> it requires carefully overriding existing defaults for so many other
> elements.
>
> To some extent, it even makes it difficult for authors to provide
> reasonable styles if they can't guarantee which elements content
> writers will choose for their caption. Imagine designing a CMS
> template with some default styles for figure and caption, the CSS in
> the template would have to deal with so many possible element choices
> just for the caption, it'll be difficult to get it right and test
> everything.
This does make sense. Would be really hard, for sure.
> There are only 2 sensible options for element choices: <legend> or
> introducing a new element. Using dt/dd is *not* and was never a
> sensible choice for figure, and the idea must be dropped.
As caption and legend have much too many backwards compatibility issues,
the only possible solution is either a new element or dropping the whole
figure-thing. The second thing should really be taken into account.
Better no syntax than bad syntax :)
What tag-titles could be used to mark the captions up? I thought of
<desc> or <description> (first is better). Does not seem to be taken,
but I don't know whether it is as intuitive. (But I as a German, who
can't speak English very well, would search for "html5 image
description" next after "html5 caption".)
MfG Nikita Popov
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