Syntax for images with captions

On 2009-12-31 John MacFarlane wrote:

http://groups.google.com/group/pandoc-discuss/msg/2ffdc4be20ab8d3a?

> Sometimes you just want an image to appear inline in the text,
> so I'm not going to incorporate this change as it is.
> But I agree that in many cases it would be good to have the
> caption, figure environment, etc.
> 
> Here's an idea, though: we could treat images specially if
> they occur by themselves in a block quote.  So,
> 
> > > ![This is my box.](box.jpg)
> 
> would be put in a figure environment, with a caption ("This is my box"),
> while
> 
> ![This is my box](box.jpg)
> 
> would just give you the image.
> 
> By the way, in an image we have
>
> ![alt text](url "title")
>
> It would be best, in my opinion, to use the alt
> text as the caption, since this allows inline
> formatting.  The title could be left as an HTML
> title.
>
> Ideally, all writers would be modified.  Even in
> HTML, you could still print the alt text as a
> caption, for example, and put the image in a div
> with an id.

Perhaps one could have a separate caption in brackets
after/instead of the title, at least in a reference
image link:

    > ![alt text]

    [alt text]: url "title" [caption]

or even inline, though I think that looks heavy:

    > [alt text](url "title" [caption])

since the same text occurring twice with images
disabled would be confusing, not to mention ugly!

Actually I would, irrespective of the caption
syntax issue, prefer not to appropriate blockquote
syntax for figure images, since one may actually
want to put an image inside a block quote!
One benefit of having a special syntax for
caption text would be that the presence of a
caption text could itself function to signal that
this should be a figure image/div'ed image.
There would be no need for any additional 
marking like a blockquote.

Images with a caption in a div makes a lot of sense.
I typically find myself doing:

    <div class="image">
    ![image](url "title")\
    Caption
    </div>

and then floating div.image in my stylesheet.  A more
markdowny syntax for this would be welcome indeed!
However I would like to have a class in addition to an
id, since it will often be the case that one wants to
treat all such images alike.
Original issue reported on code.google.com by bpjonsson@gmail.com on 7 Jan 2010 at 1:13
Awkee / pandoc

Syntax for images with captions #194
