Re: [whatwg] image captions

[David Walbert]

On Jun 27, 2006, at 7:42 AM, dolphinling wrote: But there's the implicit association given by the fact that they're there, together, in the <div>, and nothing else is. Do you really need anything more than that? There is also the implicit association given by the fact that the caption immediately follows the image. Visually, one assumes that the caption would be placed next to or beneath the image; nonvisually, one would hear or read the caption directly after the image or its alternate text. So there is certainly nothing "wrong," in practical terms, with simply placing them together in a logical div and not worrying further about it. (One also assumes that the text of the caption should clearly relate to the image -- clear writing will help make the association clear.) For scripting purposes I have occasionally needed to tie an image and its caption explicitly by giving them related IDs that a particular _javascript_ function can call (e.g. img id="img1" and p id="img-caption"), and it would be helpful in these situations to have a standard syntax for that explicit relation. But the availability of such syntax should not imply that everyone needs to use it for all markup, all the time; I can't see it being useful in ordinary web design (to the reader/user, which should ultimately be the point) unless there are actions associated with the image and caption. ____________________________________ David J. Walbert  Editorial Director & Information Designer LEARN NC School of Education The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill