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Re: IMG with a caption?

for

From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Mar 3, 2005 10:58PM

On Thu, 3 Mar 2005, christian.bradford wrote:

> Would encapsulation in a definition list, with the img in the and
> the caption in the , be considered an acceptably accessible
> solution?

It would be semantically absurd and it would not achieve any useful
default layout rendering, so it is clearly inferior to using, say,
just div elements.

If a speech-based browser implemened a according to its defined
semantics (ignoring any examples in the specification that contradict
that), it would be natural to read
xxxyyy
as follows: "Definition list. Term: xxx. Definition data: yyy.
End of definition list." Current browsers probably don't do that,
but would you really like to _fear_ that some browsers start
behaving by the specs?

> This may only make sense semantically if you have multiple
> (rather, a list of) images.

No, it would not make sense semantically in any case. The number
of images is not the issue; a list can have just one element, though
it's a rather pathetic list. But neither an image nor its caption
is a term being defined. Well, except in a contrived example like the
following:

a fundamental property of matter
where mass.gif is an image that consists of the word "mass"
in some appearance.

> The list would need to be styled as well to achieve the layout desired.

The element is in practice just a visual layout trick, and a coarse
and unreliable at that. Here you wouldn't even _want_ to have the layout
people usually expect to get when they use the trick. Besides,
is more difficult to style than most elements, since its default
rendering is complicated and hard to describe, and there are quirks
in CSS implementations that make the styling even harder.

--
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/