HTML5 semantic article list

I’d use an article for each snippet (i.e. a news teaser).

Each article contains an h1 element for the heading, an img element for the image, and p element(s) for the text.

As you probably want to link to a full version, you could enclose all elements in one a element (which is allowed in HTML5), or the heading etc. only.

So it could look like:

Only use figure if this image itself should have a separate caption. The news description (here contained in p) usually isn’t the caption for that image.

You may change the order of the article children. Thanks to the way sectioning elements work, the heading doesn’t have to be the first element.

You may use an ul, but it’s not necessary. ol, however, should only be used if the order is really meaningful for understanding the content (i.e. a different order would change the meaning of the document). Typical example: if the items are ranked by relevance (e.g. most relevant teaser at the top), you should use ol.

Regarding that doesn’t necessarily have something to do with the understanding of the term "article".

The teaser should also be an article – the teaser article and the fulltext article are different articles, although they refer to the same entity.