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HTML5 defines meta/@name=description, and this is a good thing, as it is used in the wild, and actually used by search engines. However, it is a case of invisible metadata, and furthermore forces authors to repeat text that already appears somewhere else on the page. A link relation or a new container element <description> could address this. See <http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2009Aug/0990.html> for a proposal of a link relation.
A link relation can easily be developed outside HTML5.
That argument applies to lots of stuff which is in HTML5 currently as well.
That does not seem like a good reason to do more of it.
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