Re: No IMG in FIG

Ka-Ping Yee ([email protected])
Wed, 2 Aug 1995 01:01:30 -0400


On Fri, 14 Jul 1995, Benjamin C. W. Sittler wrote:
> It would be really nice if the content model on FIG were changed to allow
> IMG's inside...

Michael Johnson replied:
> Yes. That sounds like a good idea to me. I can't think of any REALLY good
> reason to disallow IMG inside of a FIG. The worst that can happen is the
> images don't get fetched and their alternate text is used instead. For
> that matter, there's no technical reason why FIG should not be allowed
> inside of a FIG. Sure, there's no current reason why disallowing it is
> a problem, but future expansions of FIG functionality may make it an
> unreasonable restriction.

[email protected] replied:
> I agree. If FIG is a peer of P, why doesn't it have the same content model?

To me the argument to allow <IMG> within <FIG> is overwhelmingly strong.
I had the impression that this functionality was exactly one of the reasons
why <FIG> allowed content: to ensure some degree of renderability by older
browsers.

In *any* case, <IMG> must be allowed within <FIG>.

For the sake of simplicity, consistency, and usefulness, i further
agree that <FIG> should have the same content model as <P>. (I don't
see how nested <FIG>s could cause problems, since it is clear that
the source and content of the figure are alternatives; exactly one
will be rendered.) I'd appreciate if anyone could show me an example
where nested <FIG>s could cause a problem.

Otherwise, i think the DTD [1] as it stands should be changed to
replace FIGTEXT with %text; and remove the exclusions from FIG:

<!ELEMENT FIG - - (OVERLAY*, CAPTION?, (%text;)*, CREDIT?)>

If there is no disagreement, how do we get this changed "for real"?

Mike Batchelor wrote:
> While experimenting with the <FIG> element, I found that <Hn> is rendered
> by Arena 0.97g outside of the figure, as a regular <Hn>, part of the text flow
> around the <FIG>.

I think this has got to be a bug.

[1] http://www.w3.org/hypertext/WWW/MarkUp/html3/html3.dtd

Ping (Ka-Ping Yee): 2B Computer Engineering, University of Waterloo, Canada
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