Joshua wrote:
This e-mail concludes the "common" items I want to check in PGTEI.
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1 - How should we markup poetry indents? In HTML, I use toput two spaces for indents on the text.... *edit* I just found in Marcello's guide that he suggests using as a quad indent. Works for me, unless someone has a different suggestion.
As we've discussed (and argued) before, it is my belief that, except where typography is integral to the poem itself ("poetry as visual art"), that poetry should be marked up in a structural, not presentational, sense. This means text characters should NEVER be used for visual layout purposes -- characters should be used only for representing textual content. Using text characters for layout mucks up usability, repurposeability, CSS styling, and accessibility. Use XSL*, CSS or other styling language to effect the desired output. End-users will now have more ability to tailor the verse to their particular reading devices. Of course, a non-parsed comment could be added to the markup explaining how the original was typeset for those wishing to try to duplicate the original layout (but then, that's one purpose for having access to the original page scans.) Why some here are so enamored with needlessly duplicating the layout of verse in markup is beyond me -- especially when the original page scans are now preserved. I see no one here saying if the original text had indented paragraphs, that we must use a tab or spaces at the start of each paragraph in markup to duplicate that. Wherever the typography is used to help the end-user identify the structure of the poem, that is automatically amenable to structural markup (even if it has to be customized for some really weird poem.) Only when the typography *is* the poem itself does one resort to presentational markup, and here SVG makes the most sense. In a project I'm working on, the 1001 Arabian Nights by Sir Richard F. Burton, there are literally thousands of "quatrains" spread throughout the work. Burton, or the typesetter, chose to present these quatrains in an unusual way, no doubt simply to save paper since the following format makes each quatrain much more compact, and with thousands of quatrains in 6000+ pages, this could mean a lot fewer pages and substantially lower printing costs. Here's an example of how a quatrain is typeset in the source: The blear-eyed scapes the pits * Wherein the lynx-eyed fall: A word the wise man slays * And saves the natural: The Moslem fails of food * The Kafir feasts in hall: What art or act is man's? * God's will obligeth all! It is clear that the layout used in this example has nothing to do with the quatrain itself (the original being Arabic and very likely formatted in a totally different way.) In XHTML, here's how I have chosen to structure it (as you see, the '*' character seen above is not reproduced since it's purpose in the original is for typographic layout only -- it is not part of the content of the verse, just as page numbers are not part of the content of a work): <div class="quatrain" id="q1234"> <p class="verse1">The blear-eyed scapes the pits</p> <p class="verse2">Wherein the lynx-eyed fall:</p> <p class="verse1">A word the wise man slays</p> <p class="verse2">And saves the natural:</p> <p class="verse1">The Moslem fails of food</p> <p class="verse2">The Kafir feasts in hall:</p> <p class="verse1">What art or act is man's?</p> <p class="verse2">God's will obligeth all!</p> </div> With XSLT, if I wanted, the above could be transformed into the original format Burton used in print, or it could be output in the more traditional ABABABAB form of most 19th century Western poetry, with no loss in comprehension of the quatrain itself. There is nothing sacred about the typographic layout of *most* poetry I've seen, pretty as it might be in the printed source -- it simply extends the various typographic conventions used for ordinary prose to aid in understanding the "voiceability" of the verse and how the verses relate to each other. Only when we get to the "poetry as visual art" craze we see a lot in 20th century poetry (and as a few have noted, in older works) that we need to preserve the exact layout. As just noted, SVG is certainly intriguing to do this layout preservation. (This is not the only possible markup scheme, but works for my purposes. I suggest PG study a more generalized structural markup scheme for verse -- study maybe 100 random works containing verse and see if for at least 90 of them some sort of general markup scheme can be developed which, when converted to XHTML, allows a single CSS style sheet to reasonably display the poetry as originally typeset. It would not surprise me if such a 90% generalized markup scheme is possible: a sort of "Poetry Markup Language" -- the other 10% would be covered by customized extensions, and for "poetry as visual art" by SVG.) Jon Noring