Jeff Seager wrote:
What's clearly missing from the IMG specification is an appropriate
means for pairing each picture or graphic with a caption. Neither ALT
nor LONGDESC is appropriate for this. My current solution, borrowed from
Darren Brierton of Vancouver (
http://www.dzr-web.com/people/darren/blog/2005/02/09/image-captions-in-xhtml/
<http://www.dzr-web.com/people/darren/blog/2005/02/09/image-captions-in-xhtml/>
), is to embed the image as the DT in a definition list, with the
caption as the DD. Semantically, this makes sense because the caption
does in fact "define" the image by adding both meaning and context for
visual and non-visual users. But assumptions have already been made in
the specifications about the nature of a definition list, and captioning
was not among those assumptions, so it's a little clunky to bend the
rules like this.
I would argue that, unless any UA does something meaningful with the
<dt><dd> pair when one is an image (unlikely since this is not an
accepted way of generating captions, but not impossible), marking up
captions in this way is no more useful than using e.g.
<div>
<img>
Caption
</div>
(I do not mean to suggest that you are using "bad markup" here; I'm just
starting to wonder, in general, whether all the discussions that people
have about the most meaningful way to markup a particular construct that
is not explicitly mentioned in the spec are actually as worthwhile as
the amount of effort that is put into them would suggest. I suspect, at
least in many cases, it is not since no UA can guess what the markup is
supposed to represent without actual AI).
A better way would be to semantically attach the caption or cutline to
the image itself, so its display is paired naturally. In this way, the
width of the cutline would be dictated (unless overruled in the
stylesheet) by the width of the image. I'm suggesting that CAPTION be
adopted as a new attribute of the IMG element, as it is already for the
TABLE element.
This has previously been brought up but typically as a caption element
since this would allow markup inside the caption. I (and I think others
too) agree that this is an important addition we should make to HTML.
--
"The universe doesn't care what you believe. The wonderful thing about
science is that it doesn't ask for your faith, it just asks for your
eyes" --- http://xkcd.com/c154.html
