3. The main exposure of the Floats is misleading from the authors perspective. Floats are TeX's typesetting perspective. For the author tabular and longtable are similar - not floating figures or floating tables. The ability to float in the final layout should be handled as a feature of the respective document entity - the correct LaTeX syntax has to be assured by the LyX2LaTeX backend.
A nice feature of the floats in latex, and currently in lyx, is that almost anything may be put inside them. So making "floating" a mere property of table/figure/algorithm would be a loss, unless the existing floats are kept too.
I have many figure floats that don't contain graphichs insets, instead the figure is made up from "unusual" text, tables and math.
One can easily imagine someone making a special table in xfig. As an example, the periodic table of elements is probably easier to make this way. Today, such a table can be put in a table float as an external inset - and it will then be listed in the list of tables and referred to as "table 17" and similar.
And it is sometimes useful to have a few paragraphs of explanatory text to the side of a narrow table/figure. Easy with a float, just put a minipage with text to the side of the figure/table, inside the float.
Please keep the generic floats even if the table UI gets an overhaul.
Helge Hafting
