Posted by Jukka K. Korpela on 11/04/07 08:04

Scripsit Adrienne Boswell:

>> I have a bunch of images (say, half a dozen)
>> that I want to place vertically down a page.
>> I want to put the captions beside them.
[...]
>> What I'd like to do is alternate them this way:

The right answer is "stop wanting that". Such a setting is confusing and
pointless. There's enough trouble in making users see the intended
association between a caption and his image, or between an image and her
caption, whichever wording expresses your feelings better. So there's no
reason to _intentionally_ create confusion and to force the eye to
participate in silly walks.

> I would say this could be tabular data, where the headers would be
> image and data describing the image. Use a table.

In the alternating scenario, it's hardly a table logically. What's a column
consisting of alternating images and texts with no connection between an
image and the text below or above it? What would you use as column headers?
(Not all data tables need column headers, but a table for which you could
not possibly write column headers that make sense is most probably not
tabular data.)

In a scenario with one column of images and another column of captions, each
associated with the image on the same row, we have tabular data - and a
<table> element may well be the best approach.

--
Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

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