figure-a

At the center of it all, standing on a high mound of earth that seemed to have risen straight through the I pavement, stood a single figure-a tall, slender Xhaldian with a crooked smile on his face.

Addicts Tree Riesener 2010

Yeah, but the proposal being made on this page is that figure-a should * mean* “a figure that should be displayed on the left”.

A design pattern for image and figure alignment | FactoryCity 2007

On the other hand “figure-a” is doing the same function, but to anyone else trying to understand your mark-up it would have no relevance unless they understood the system you were using, which seems to me to somewhat defeat the objective of semantics.

A design pattern for image and figure alignment | FactoryCity 2007

In print publications (say, books), there are often lists of figures, but figure-a is never repeated in a book.

A design pattern for image and figure alignment | FactoryCity 2007

If I want to change my site design a year from now, I can switch figure-a from float: left to float: right or anything else I choose.

A design pattern for image and figure alignment | FactoryCity 2007

For the ‘figure-a’ you could find a more semantic tag than “a”.

A design pattern for image and figure alignment | FactoryCity 2007

Adding figure-a will center it on the line, figure-b will align it to the right and figure-c will align it to the left.

A design pattern for image and figure alignment | FactoryCity 2007

Do you think it would be better to give a class of “figure” to style all figures, then give each figure a unique ID value of figure-a, instead of adding another class?

A design pattern for image and figure alignment | FactoryCity 2007

The cool thing about figure-a is that my user agent has no reason to render it left or right or center, but may render it some other way depending on what * makes sense* for the first figure in an article.

A design pattern for image and figure alignment | FactoryCity 2007

If I want to change my site design a year from now, I can switch figure-a from float: left to float: right or anything else I choose.

A design pattern for image and figure alignment | FactoryCity 2007