Sent from my Phone From: don kretz Sent: 11/28/2012 11:29 PM To: Lee Passey Subject: RE: HTML rules and poetry I would pass it along but I wouldn't dare. I tried exactly that and got this as a typical response: <pre> (or white-space: pre) is a very bad idea. [i]Very[/i] bad. Period. To wide acclaim. And had my post excised from the conversation as "off topic." And accused of being too "philosophical" - apparently one of their strongest pejoratives. Not an open-minded group I'm afraid. Keep in mind those Best Practices are a fait-accompli imposition by a small group hand-picked by the GM who tends not to react well to disagreement or talking about reasons for things (philosophy). Sent from my Phone From: Lee Passey Sent: 11/28/2012 2:52 PM To: don kretz Subject: HTML rules and poetry I've been working on the section of my HTML rules which apply to poems. Of course, I've been comparing my thoughts to the new "HTML Best Practices" at DP, as I believe that consistency is more important than absolute correctness. I have a few comments that I would like you to convey to whomever is the primary author of the poetry "Case Study." According to the best definitions I can find online, poetry is a composition generally involving emotional or lofty thoughts expressed in imaginative words. Verse is any expression in words which simply conforms to accepted metrical rules and structure. A poem is simply poetry in verse. Thus, when one encounters a poem in source materials I prefer classifying it as <tag class='poem'> instead of <tag class='poetry'> It seems to me that in books we usually encounter "poems" not "poetry," so the former classification seems more accurate. Further, a cursory look at current HTML practice at PG seems to indicate that "class='poem'" is more commonly used than "class='poetry'"; prior practice should not bind us, but we should let it guide us. Secondly, when poems are encountered which have varying indentations of lines the "Case Study" recommends enclosing each line in a <div> with varying classifications as to how far that particular line should be indented (e.g. <div class="indent1">, <div class="indent2">, etc.). I dislike using classifications to indicate style instead of semantics, especially when the classifications have no global meaning outside of the specific text. But even more important is the overarching goal that presentation should be preserved, as much as possible, even when a style sheet is lost, or a User Agent has a poor implementation of CSS. In HTML, (including HTML5) the W3C suggests that the <pre> element is the preferred method of marking poems. A common hack is to not use the <pre> element, but to do indentation with a variable number of non-breaking spaces. I can't say I'm particularly enamored with either of these solutions, but they do both have the virtue that the desired effect is preserved when CSS is lost. In the end, I think I would follow the W3C and use: <pre class="poem"> The classification is added so that CSS-aware User Agents can override the default presentation of <pre> if desired.