Figure is kind of a dumb word for the tag considering what it does.
What it does is allow you to attach captions to pretty much anything visual, in a semantic way. A good idea, but the implementation could use work…just like <nav> should work like this:
Which is pretty much exactly what XHTML2 was moving toward with <nl> (including the ‘href’ attribute being supported for all elements, which makes a lot of sense since not everything clickable is an ‘anchor’)
If they just allowed an optional <caption> tag inside <img>, <video>, and <audio>, we wouldn’t really need <figure>
Well, not quite, since the idea behind NAV was to be able to wrap it around things OTHER than just lists. If they wanted a tag just for lists, they could simply have brought back ‘menu’… which was deprecated as redundant to UL.
Hence my problem with HTML 5, seems like somebody making the decisions has a torrid love for all the tags that were deprecated as redundant/pointless… to go hand in hand with the new tags they pulled out of their backside that are also redundant/pointless. Like Audio, Video, Section, etc.
I think rather than allowing it ‘inside’ tags that, well… shouldn’t have things inside them except as fallbacks. (video, audio, object) if at all (IMG is a empty element, cannot contain markup – ever!) a much simpler solution would have been to allow the use of the caption tag anywhere, with a ‘for’ attribute like with labels. Then you could point it at anything you can put an ID on.
I’d rather reuse a single tag than add two more tags to the DOM list.
Though remember these are the guys whose logo looks like Batman is their enemy:
Yes, that’s where <nav> came from originally, but during mailing list wars many mentioned, as Crusty did, that navigation isn’t limited to unordered lists, and the future could hold anything, so it became a separate tag to wrap around whatever the author considers “primary navigation.” On some pages, it might actually just be a search form. I don’t use <nav>.
They could have done that with the new elements, but changing how an existing one works in modern parsers was something they worked very hard not to screw with (as Crusty mentioned again… EMPTY elements like <img> may NOT contain markup!)… and when they did make a change, their “out” was usually that browsers’ parsers DID already deal with that use case, usually with their error rendering (so why it wasn’t a big deal to change <a> to now be like <ins> and <del>… block or inline content depending on where it was. Too many web pages over the last 15 years were already wrapping <a>s around blocks, so it was no new idea for browser parsers. Similarly, so many people screwed up the
<meta http-equiv=“content-type” content=“text/html; charset=utf-8”> to
<meta http-equiv=“content-type” content="text/html;" charset=“utf-8”> that now you can get away with, and apparently always could with older browsers, this:
<meta charset=“utf-8”>).
This was the main objection to actually adding href attributes to more elements. Too hard to implement, make accessible, and then figure out what to do about the total break in backwards compatibility, which everyone has decided is absolutely necessary.
This is also all over ye olden mailing lists… them discussing these ideas and why they didn’t pan out. HTML5 was a break-off group’s alternative solution to the breaking-backwards-compatibility-and-adding-draconian-error-handling XHTML2. HTML5 is partially why XHTML2 is dead today.
Which again, is just them using the word and to blazes with it’s meaning… welcome to yet another reason HTML 5 is {nasty string of expletives involving excrement omitted}
Really? People are DUMB ENOUGH to want to use this {even nastier string of expletives involving excrement omitted}
Two tags, one cup?
Really funny is on those pages, NONE of the elements presented would qualify as a figure from a typographical or classical writing point of view. Those are PLATES, not figures. They’re just a photograph of something, not a figure. They are not diagrams, technical breakdowns or formula… So literally, they’re taking the word and throwing it’s meaning out the window out of either ignorance or incompetence. JOY!
MAKE things harder to learn.
Can we just nuke these {expletive omitted} from orbit? It’s the only way to be sure.
WhatWG indeed, should be called WhatThe{expletive}WG
That would actually be a good name; that’s exactly what these would have been 100 years ago in print. Guess nobody at the spec meetings was that old
Man, back when you wanted to snap some vacation pics of the kids in the National Park, you had to lug all those glass plates and the accordion body and your cans of chemicals…
