I’m afraid that being your typical skinny white guy I have no appreciable butt to slap, but I’m glad I could help.
Well, yes, I suppose you’re talking about the semantic web types, but then they are the ones insisting on the separation of content and layout that causes such frustration in the first place. They’re not arguing that web designers shouldn’t control presentation (what user wants to style every website?), but that the underlying information should be easily extractable in case the user (or some mashup creator) wants to display it in a different context. Semantic web people, I think, would not be interested in expanding the HTML spec to encompass every possible layout element, as it would essentially defeat their purpose. A separate caption tag wouldn’t obviously be associated with an image (there would be nothing to stop you from placing it completely separately), and its semantic purpose is already served by the “title” attribute of the img tag itself.
When I mean “stop supporting IE6” I mean “if you have a centered layout in all modern browsers but IE6 won’t center for shit” than it’s probably not worth it. Obviously, you want graceful degradation, and if you have (somehow) managed to make a completely undecipherable website for IE6, you should step away from the keyboard. For valid websites, almost every problem in IE6 is just a matter of aesthetics. But yea, audience is key - trendy design sites for other designers have limited reason to support IE6, as designers most use something far better. That’s why you check your visitor logs!
I suppose I’m not as well versed in the theory as yourself, but if there is a caption tag for tables, then there should be one for images. Or the existing tag for that semantic purpose (title) should be shown somewhere next to the picture. I still think that would be a useful feature.
