[gutvol-d] Marking up poetry in (x)html

17 Feb 2012

      There have been one or two appends over the last month or two which have
mentioned the difficulty of marking up poetry in html.
Trawling through the web this afternoon I came across:
http://gtwebdev.com/workshop/misc/verse.php
Which also refers to:
http://webtypography.net/Rhythm_and_Proportion/Blocks_and_Paragraphs/2.3.4/
To summarise, these seem to me to imply that there is an 'architected' way
using CSS to mark up verse so that it is centred in the page, set flush left
and ragged right (which I take to be what is required) namely to use a block
whose CSS style is: {display: table; margin: 0 auto;} but please read the
actual references for more erudite details.

To take an example from PG3496 - Jack Tier by James Fenimore Cooper, which I
have been converting to epub, there is a quotation at the head of chapter 4
which I originally marked up as follows:

<blockquote class="margins-inset">

"Leander dived for love. Leucadia's cliff 
 The Lesbian Sappho leap'd from in a miff, 
 To punish Phaon; Icarus went dead, 
 Because the wax did not continue stiff; 
 And, had he minded what his father said, 
 He had not given a name unto his watery bed."
Sands.
</blockquote>

Where the stylesheet contains:
blockquote.margins-inset {
    font-size: 90%;
    margin-left: 3em;
    margin-right: 3em;
    margin-top: 0.5em;
    margin-bottom: 0.5em}

This displays a poem left-justified to the left margin at 3em.

Following the advice in the references I then changed this to:

<blockquote class="margins-inset">
"Leander dived for love. Leucadia's cliff 
 The Lesbian Sappho leap'd from in a miff, 
 To punish Phaon; Icarus went dead, 
 Because the wax did not continue stiff; 
 And, had he minded what his father said, 
 He had not given a name unto his watery bed."
Sands.
</blockquote>

Where the style sheet now contains in addition:
p.verse {
    display: table;
    margin: 0 auto}

Displaying this changed version with IE9 makes the verse left-justified, but
with the longest line centred, as the references imply.
This doesn't work in any of my Sony Readers, but neither does it work any
worse than the previous version, so I am thinking that as a way to mark up
poetry in a device-independent way (works best on a full-spec browser, but
still looks acceptable on an e-reader) so that one XHTML master file could
be used to produce both HTML and epubs, it might be quite useful.

Can anybody see anything wrong with this?
Would either of these versions look right on a kindle?

Bob Gibbins

[gutvol-d] Marking up poetry in (x)html

Robert Gibbins