thoughts

[HTML] Reinventing the wheel (or just rediscovering)

2005-03-19 modified: 2005-06-23

Because HTML elements alone are not enough to discribe your data best, the class attribute is there. As I've written before, use classnames wisely and with semantics in mind. However, when everyone invents their own classnames, documents and stylesheets are not as interchangable as one might wish. Therefore I suggest to use terms that are already common: meet the newspaper terminology.

A short list of terms that might be useful. If your site is a blog or otherwise article related, the next few terms might be useful classnames for parts of your document.

Byline

A Byline is the line which tells the author of the article. Do not forget about the address element however.

Caption

This is some information below a photo or artwork.

Chapeau

A subtitle appearing below a header. This is often seen in newspapers and below flags of a site. This is not a head element one level deeper, as I see often. Just make it <p class="chapeau"> please.

Credit line

The name of a photographer or artist. One might consider to use address for these as well, but I guess address should be used only for author information of a relatively significant part of your document.

Cutline

This is just another word for Caption. I would prefer the latter.

Dateline

A dateline is the first few words of a news article, those that state the place of origin of the story. A dateline is part of the lede (see below) and is often printed in capitals (as well as boldface, inherited from the lede).

Flag

The name of the newspaper (site). I suggest to use <div id="flag"> in favor of <h1> for the name of your site, as explained here.

Lede

The lede of an article are the first few sentences summarizing the whole, these are often printed in boldface.

Refer

A short piece that tells you about an article elsewhere. In newspaper they fill up the frontpage, on sites they do just the same (see my frontpage for example).

For some more about useful constructs, see this article.