For some time I've struggled with the problem of displaying simple
captioned figures on webpages in a way that is robust and scalable. I
tend to make "boring" (um, I mean "conservatively elegant") pages that
are text-heavy and that resemble academic publications. Despite the
origin of HTML in the world of scientific communication, the absence
of a FIGURE element to serve as a counterpart to the TABLE element is
surprising. This topic has been discussed in c.i.w.a.s before; if you
search the group for "figures and captions" you'll find some earlier
threads.
I had been working on a table-based approach, but for now have given
up on that because of inheritance inconsistencies across browsers. I
am now experimenting with a div-based approach which so far is working
well, at least for simple single-image figures. My experiments are
based on an earlier proposal for captioned figures by Bert Bos; I've
tried to extend his work by adding a few new features. My
demonstration page is here:
http://rjohara.net/server/css-figures-captions/
If you have an interest in captioned figures and/or traditional
typography take a look and see if you can identify any problems with
the page. An important feature of these figures is that they are
scalable: if the page author specifies that the figure should be 50%
of the width of the textblock, it should stay that way even when the
viewport dimensions change or the font size changes.
One weakness of the approach shown on this page is that it makes
considerable use of the max-width property, which is not supported on
the most common browsers today (IE5&6). The figures don't break under
these browsers, but if an author uses an image with small intrinsic
dimensions it may over-scale when the viewport is wide.
Bob O'Hara (http://rjohara.net)