When writing an article preview template I discovered the following:

Content of the template variable description.first.paragraph in articles seems odd. According to documentation it returns all the content until the first carriage return. And that is exactly what it does. HTML structure is completely ignored. It has happened to me that the variable was empty since after copying of some text into the editor window html code started with a carriage return.

The variable should probably rather contain the first paragraph as marked by <p></p> or at least all text until the first <br/> !? Ideally, tags would also be stripped, such that a "read more" link can be appended in the same line and not only the next paragraph.

Maybe this is rather an RFE. I can put it there if you disagree that this is a bug.