Titles Banners Captions

A table-only caption is first told apart from a principal financial-statement or numbered schedule title using Recognising Ambiguous Headings (§6.7). A principal statement title can be a document heading, and a company line printed directly above it joins that heading (see Stacked Headings (§6.9)); a units line cannot. A numbered schedule title printed within a grid keeps its structural role, but its text MUST stay in the table once and MUST NOT be duplicated as an outside heading. The frame test below applies to ordinary table captions and bands.

The position of the ink relative to the ruled border, and whether the band carries the table's fill, decide:

Only text that belongs to the table alone counts. A page heading that happens to sit above a table, and would still make sense if the table were removed, is not a title band.

A bold caption with paragraph spacing directly above a bordered mini-table follows the same rule: it MUST be the first <caption> inside the table HTML.

A title band rendered as a row MUST be a single full-width <th colspan=N> — never the title in one column with empty cells padded beside it.

| [colspan=3]Table 13 — Scale G2 |    vs    | Table 13 — Scale G2 |  |  |
                                             ↑ padded: a spurious record

A full-width single-value row is recognised as a title and set aside; the padded form reads as a real data row with missing values, and adds a row that the table does not have.

A table-only title therefore has two forms, chosen by its printed role: a full-width header row for an in-frame band, or <caption> for a caption outside the printed frame.

A title MUST appear once, in the form selected by the frame test. A <caption> MUST NOT also appear as a paragraph outside the table or as a header row.

A centred band title MUST span the region it heads, not the pixels its letters happen to cover.

|      Proposed      |            ← ink covers 4 of 14 column tracks:
| c1 | c2 | … | c14 |              colspan=4 or colspan=14?

A "Proposed" banner over a 14-column table is colspan=14, even though its ink reaches only the middle four. Centred text shrinks toward the middle whatever it spans, so measuring the glyphs measures the font, not the structure.

A divider row that names no columns — "Part I — Financial Information" and the like — SHOULD be rendered as a bold body row (<td colspan=N>); a <th> row MAY be used instead. A document MUST use one of the two for every visually identical band — see Choices Made Once Per Document (§4.2). Whichever tag is used, a divider MUST NOT be promoted into the column-name tier: it labels a region, not a column.

| Part I — Financial Information |   ← names no columns
| Item 1 | 10-Q | 45 |

Bold <td> is the preferred form because a <th> claims "this labels the cells below it", and a section divider makes no such claim.

A table or chart caption MUST be rendered once as <caption>…</caption> inside the HTML table that represents its object. Reading order determines its position in the HTML source:

• A caption read before the table or chart MUST be the first content line after the opening <table> tag, before any rows or table-section wrappers.
• A caption read after the table or chart MUST be the last content line before </table>, after all rows and table-section wrappers.
• A chart's table MUST still open with <table data-source="chart">.

caption before the table:
<table>
  <caption>Table 5 — Lapse Rates</caption>
  <!-- rows -->
</table>

caption after the chart:
<table data-source="chart">
  <!-- rows -->
  <caption>Figure 2 — Annual losses</caption>
</table>

The first/last requirement concerns the serialized HTML, including captions after the final row. Source notes, footnotes and nearby prose retain their own roles and MUST NOT be turned into captions. Captions of objects that are not represented by tables retain their adjacent paragraphs.

In the element list, a caption MUST be attached to the table or chart it describes wherever the association is clear from the page. It retains the Caption class and its own box even when its rendering is nested inside <table>; the table or chart box follows Block Boundaries (§5.2). When the association is unclear, the output MUST NOT invent an attachment.

Caption formatting is content

Captions are rarely plain text, and their styling is printed content like any other. It MUST be preserved as printed, per run:

printed:      Figure 2. Predicted vs True Tree count on the test set.
              ^^^^^^^^^ bold          ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ plain
output:       <caption><strong>Figure 2.</strong> Predicted vs True Tree count on the test set.</caption>

printed:      FIG.2.3. Electric and non-electric energy growth rate (from [1]).
              ^ all italic
output:       <caption><em>FIG.2.3. Electric and non-electric energy growth rate (from [1]).</em></caption>

Three shapes recur: fully italic, a bold label followed by plain text, and a caption set in a heading-like face. A bold run stays bold, an italic run stays italic, and a mixed caption keeps the boundary between them. Styles MUST NOT be normalised to one, and MUST NOT be dropped because the text survives without them. The per-run discipline is the one that governs styling inside tables — see Bold and Italic Inside Tables (§9.6.2).

A caption MUST NOT be converted into a heading, even when it is set in a heading-like face. A ## heading above the table asserts a document section that the page did not print, and it survives into any structure derived from the headings. A caption names an object; a heading opens a section.

This is the placement rule only. Whether a given piece of text is a caption at all, or a title band inside the table, is settled by the frame test above.