Oh, you are indeed right about the figure element! Sorry for missing your point at first. I would not blame this on pandoc though, it's my mistake of missing w

Oh, you are indeed right about the figure element! Sorry for missing your point at first. I would not blame this on pandoc though, it's my mistake of missing what the intended purpose of figure element is, because I haven't studied the spec and browsers doesn't do anything useful with it (as you pointed out). That said if I used pandoc to generate pdf via latex, I would have noticed that, since the figures are repositioned as expected in such case. And while I agree that in the current state, it's kind of pointless for browsers to try to take advantage of this element when most of the real code is against the spec, I believe that it didn't help that browsers didn't do that in the beginning when nobody was using it yet. But since the spec is not explicitly asking for anything, browsers did the bare minimum. While I can imagine 2 use cases already: i) better layout of printed page (eg. when I try to print my blog post, firefox will happily cut a figure in half if I select print on a5 paper even though it could try to reorganize it bit smarter ...) ii) similar to what you describe, an ability to show the figures in a separate window so that you can see the text and figures at the same time (this is actually similar to a picture-in-picture like feature for images what I describe in the blog, and to be honest I would still find that kind of useful)