Hi James, All, Am 30.11.2012 um 01:16 schrieb James Adcock <jimad@msn.com>:
In the end, I think I would follow the W3C and use: <pre class="poem">
The pre suggestion is so bad that I think that those who read it at DP assumed you have not seriously studied the issue of how to code poetry in HTML.
In general the "poetry" problem is how to reliably wrap lines of text on small machines according to common poetry standards, and to do so in a manner that actual runs correctly on the great majority of reader devices. And to do so in a manner that doesn't require an excess of gimcrackery while coding the HTML. Excuse me, poetry standard!!!!! There is no such thing! There are different forms of poetry, but a standard. Then, there are the semantic tags, that tell a user agent that maybe you need to mangle the TEXT for display. but a standard.
In a true standard, you would need to mark-up the fact that you have pentameter, hexamters, etc. This information would be needed to properly mangle the text, so that it can be read in all its glory. Yet, that is not in the standard. I do admit that it is not so much a problem of mark-up, but the poor quality of user agents. Soo
This problem is an unsolved, and presumably unsolvable problem.
regards Keith.