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Currently, HTML 5 specifies that the caption for <figure> is represented by the <legend> element. Unfortunately, the <legend> element implies a <fieldset> in the HTML parser in already shipped and installed instances of Gecko. If <legend> is used, this is a rather notable barrier for author adoption of <figure> even if the generation of implied fieldset were removed in a future release. Furthermore, the <legend> element comes with form-related DOM baggage: the HTMLLegendElement interface from DOM Level 2 HTML. Since <caption> is also legacy-encumbered, I suggest minting a new element to remove the adoption barriers for <figure> and its caption. Since the English thesaurus has been exhausted, I suggest minting a new element name that has some qualifying prefix for the word "caption": e.g. <figcaption>. (I'm assuming here that <rubric> wouldn't be appropriate.)
IMHO the long-term author confusion from having yet another element (or likely two, since <figcaption> wouldn't work for <details>) for this kind of semantic far outweighs the short-term migration problem. In practice, <legend> will soon not be any more of a problem than <section>. (The DOM baggage is pretty minimal on HTMLLegendElement; I don't really see that as a problem. It doesn't have any special behaviour like, say, <label>.)
Since it seems "caption" is really the word we're looking for, but legacy parsing wants caption to be properly placed in a table, why not simply make a legacy synonym element to the figure element as has been suggested in the past[1]. With this approach, the parsing algorithm could be updated to permit 'caption' elements in "figure" elements in addition to the "table" element. In the meantime, authors can use: <table f > <caption>some caption text</caption> <tr><td><img src='uri' alt='alt text' > </table> in the same way they will eventually use <figure> <caption>some caption text</caption> <img src='uri' alt='alt text' > </figure> in all XML parsed HTML and HTML5 parsed text/html in the future. Note the use of the "f" boolean minimized attribute to indicate this is a figure element and almost the same character count in the legacy compatible approach as the figure example. With this approach authors get immediate CSS support for figures that I expect behaves much the way we would want the figure caption to behave. figure, table[f] {caption-side: bottom; } or figure, table[f] {caption-side: top; } Sure it's a little contrived in the interim, but there's a lot in HTML5 that's a little contrived. And it works today!
(In reply to comment #1) I'll not here also that this suggestion in comment #2 doesn't need to prevent the use of 'legend' for 'details' elements. Either way we have 'legend' and we have 'caption'. Its only a matter of where precisely each one gets used.
I propose to wait and see how this plays out, since it's not a particularly critical feature.
ended up using leif's suggestion from http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2009Feb/0207
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