Bowerbird@aol.com wrote:
5. smallcaps -- [span class="smcap"]
i believe smallcaps are unnecessary as well, as they are almost always _presentational_... (and when they are not, we need to use a substantial way to indicate their actuality.)
Small caps are frequently used to indicate when a personal name at the end of a letter is actually a signature. That is the case here. In the presentation of genealogical information, they are also used to distinguish individuals whose line will be explored further from those who are not. Small caps are a reasonable choice, and if they are in the original, why not mark them up as such? If we didn't, what would be "a substantial way to indicate their actuality"?
8. poetry -- [div class="poem"][div class="stanza"]
using divs and spans to do poetry indents is extremely typical of the convoluted crap that markup bureaucrats want to impose on you; can work just fine to create an indent, but that would make things too easy for you!
I have a book of poetry in which some of the lines are so long that they wrap, and the publisher has taken care to indent the wrapped part. Marking up individual lines with divs will allow a more flexible presentation than just using at the start of lines -- you'll be able to cope with indentation and wrapping in one go, whatever the readers' chosen screen width and font size.
as in the last book, however, we find that jim is starting to introduce a lot of markup "cruft" into his books, much of it probably due to his "tools".
Jim has already said that he has tried a variety of tools over time and that he wasn't pleased with all the results. However, if you weren't so keen on pillorying his efforts in the name of education, you'd see that some of the markup you decry as presentational or "cruft" is just what we need to preserve the original work with fidelity and flexibility.