Re: ISSUE-128 (figure-in-p): Chairs Solicit Proposals

Sam Ruby wrote:
> 'Authors should be able to use <figure> where <img> can be used'
> 
> Per the decision policy, at this time the chairs would like to solicit
> volunteers to write Change Proposals.
> 
> http://www.w3.org/html/wg/tracker/issues/128

I volunteer to write a Change Proposal.

The current draft of the Change Proposal is at
http://www.w3.org/html/wg/wiki/ChangeProposals/FigureInP

The proposal will likely be refined between now and November 5th.

As drafted, this change proposal has two major aspects: a less controversial one and a more controversial one.

The less controversial part make the figure start tag token not close an open p element implicitly. This merely makes the HTML5 parsing algorithm align with legacy parsers and makes it possible to use the figure element as a child of p when the content being presented as a figure would work as a child of p (e.g. img, svg or object). Authors would benefit from this part right away.

The more controversial part makes a figure element on the tree builder stack prevent an ancestor p from closing when an element that would otherwise autoclose p appears as a descendant of figure. In other words, figure becomes like button as far as p autoclosing goes. Since legacy parsers don't know about figure at all, this is a novel feature. This feature makes it possible to present any content (including pre and table) as a figure even when figure is a child of p. Authors would benefit from this part once they no longer try to make their pages work in browsers that predate this change.

I invite feedback on these two aspects of the proposal particularly from practicing Web designers.

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen@iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/

Received on Tuesday, 5 October 2010 07:08:35 UTC