[whatwg] lede element

[Daniel Brumbaugh Keeney]

On Dec 12, 2007 3:40 AM, Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch> wrote:
>
> I read all the e-mails quoted below, and my conclusion is that <lede> or
> <lead> is not compelling enough to warrant its own element. It's also not
> _that_ common -- a sample of a dozen or so news sites indexed by Google
> News for the keyword "first lego league" just now didn't find any articles
> with leads (though a wider search did find a couple that had summary
> paragraphs before the article itself, which could arguably be taken to be
> lead paragraphs).
>
> I think that <b> is actually the right element to use here -- "a span of
> text to be stylistically offset from the normal prose without conveying
> any extra importance". I've added an example to the spec that shows how to
> do this.

I understand that ledes are only sometimes style differently, but they
are always present, and I was considering more the point that Elliotte
Harold brought up, "Some of the ugliest XSLT I've ever written exists
primarily to extract unmarked-up leads from paragraphs." This element
would be extremely useful to news aggregators, as well as it's
potential styling in the document itself. To repeat myself, "[This
element] would be useful to news aggregators in particular as an
alternative to using the first sentence (Google), the first paragraph
(Yahoo) or the meta description(bbc)." That's all I can say. I
understand if this element does not reach the threshold of
significance for a new element.

-Daniel Brumbaugh Keeney