HTML5 element support

I'd like to make a feature request. The Netsurf documentation says to post
it on this list rather than using the bug reporting system.

The Netsurf progress page says an HTML5 parser is being in the process of
development; that's good but HTML5 has been used for 6 years now and what
seems to me (if I'm right) a minor change might allow the existing engine
to display HTML5 as it was intended, even if it doesn't 'understand' the
concept of some of the new elements/structures.

Specifically, my web site has over 60 pages that use the HTML5 figure and
figcaption elements to contain content (images and their captions
alongside). Netsurf doesn't recognise these and doesn't act upon styles
applied to them in CSS. The page renders as if they were not there. But
I've set properties such as making them inline-blocks with vertical
centering next to each other, OK on Chrome/Firefox but none of this works
in Netsurf whose display output is ruined in a cascade of incorrectly
positioned elements.

It seems to me that if the figure and figcaption elements were simply
considered as being div elements, the display would work as intended.

At present the only way I could get around the issue is to wrap the HTML5
elements in a div, and apply the styles to the div and not the HTML5
element.

OK ideally the new elements should have default styles (for example
Firefox puts a 16 pixel top/bottom and 40 pixel left/right margin on the
figure element, whereas a normal div has none) but that doesn't matter
much as if Netsurf supported styles on HTML5 elements, I would be able to
set all those things manually.

Whilst I've only tested this on figure and figcaption, other HTML5
elements like aside, nav, footer are also I suppose in the same boat.

Best regards
Ewen Pring

--
Ewen Pring, St. Albans, Herts
using RISC OS 5
https://timebus.co.uk/riscos/