Thanks, Steve.
You wrote: "Unclear what your issue is with figure/figcaption, the semantics
of the figure element is that its a grouping element."
My issue is the choice of the word "figure" for this tag. I can't find any
English dictionary reference that defines "figure" as a "group of items."
The word figure has quite a few definitions and most of them involve:
- Something to do with a numerical symbol or value amount;
- Something to do with a person, such as their appearance or standing in
society;
- A symbol of something.
There's no "group" concept in any of the definitions.
If you want a tag that groups things, why not call it <GROUP>? Otherwise
you might as well randomly choose any word in the dictionary to represent
this "grouping element."
<CHOCOLATE> would be just as accurate as <FIGURE>.
The second issue I have is that the computer industry, especially
programmers, takes common words and flips them upside down, using them in
ways never intended. This doesn't help the industry. As a former college
instructor of several programming languages and technologies, I've watched
this confuse the heck out of my students, semester after semester.
Example:
HTML defined all graphics in a webpage to use the <IMG> tag. I wish a better
word had been chosen because "image" is defined as a likeness of something.
But it is broad enough that I'm willing to shoehorn every graphic on a
webpage into the figure tag.
A few years later Adobe created tagged PDFs and instead of coordinating
their code with existing HTML tags, they decide to reinvent the wheel and
tag every graphic in a PDF as <FIGURE>. Bad decision for 2 reasons:
1. It doesn't coordinate with the existing tag used by HTML.
2. There are many types of graphics that don't fit the definition of a
"figure," such as a photograph of a landscape vista.
W.T.F. Didn't anyone at Adobe have access to a list of HTML tags or have
basic training in HTLM 101?
And now you're telling us to use <FIGURE> as a grouping tag.
W.T.F. Doesn't anyone on the HTML team have access to a dictionary or
thesaurus?
As I said before: "Never in my editorial mind would I ever call a table a
figure, nor the extracted poem in an HTML5 example on the W3C's website.
Jeeze Louise, are there any professional editors at the W3C who can step in
and say 'that's not the best word for that item'?"
Now, if you decide to call this "grouping element" <CHOCOLATE>, you won't
get any complaints out of me! <grin>
But don't call it <FIGURE>. That's just so wrong on so many levels.
