[whatwg] <b> Lede Example

'Smylers' Smylers at stripey.com
Fri Jun 19 05:00:42 PDT 2009


Kristof Zelechovski writes:

> A lede is a summary or an invitation to read the whole article.  It is
> semantically relevant; the reader may ask, e.g., "Give me the ledes
> and I shall choose what I would like to read".

For a user-agent to reliably provide that functionality would require a
specific <lede> element, not merely allowing one of several uses of <b>
be for denoting ledes.

Using <b> for ledes really only enables ledes to be styled differently,
not for semantic interpretation.

> Asking for "the first paragraph of each article" is not that
> practical, as the article need not contain a lede there

Are there sites which have variable-length semantic ledes, use an
element to mark that up, and where a reader who doesn't have the lede
styled differently (for example if <span class=lede> is used and the
reader doesn't have CSS) is missing something?

In practice it seems that sites which style ledes also have a
journalistic house style which requires journalists to consistently have
the lede be the first paragraph (or whatever).

Smylers


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