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. It may even render it on another page (on a mobile device where real estate is important maybe).

That’s what makes completely non-presentational semantics cool – the user does what makes sense instead of being stuck to what the publisher wanted. If you *must* embed style information, use the style attribute.

But FWIW I would have named the alignments differently, i.e.:
-a left (first), -b right (the obvious next one), which leaves -c for center (slightly mnemonic).

–bentrem

Besides the attacks and small banter, it was especially to do with the working groups and they’re ‘befuddling progress’.

My point is, it’s even more frustrating coming up with semantics when the standards for markup are in a stalled state such as this.

At some point, I’d like to see a revival of sites like http://bitesizestandards.com and more promotion of correct coding methods.

Thanks for bringing up this topic up again and allowing discussion (comments).