On 2/18/2012 1:22 PM, don kretz wrote:
There are two examples of possibly legitimate markup for poems at eb.readingroo.ms <http://eb.readingroo.ms> in wordpress context, duplicated at eb.readingroo.ms/dt.html <http://eb.readingroo.ms/dt.html and eb.readingroo.ms/canto.html <http://eb.readingroo.ms/canto.html in thrawest possible form (just view source in your browser.)
They both use completely un-marked-up text (zero markup) as sources.
Feedback please - I'm working out a poetry strategy too.
FWIW, I don't like the presentation at all -- but that is a result of your style sheets, not your markup -- which is, in fact, non-existent. /My/ most fundamental rule for markup is that a document must look acceptable on a device that cannot handle CSS. On this count, your proposed formulation fails spectacularly. In spite of Mr. Adcock's objections, I think that for poetry the <pre> element is exactly what is called for (and this is the opinion of the W3C as well; see http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/REC-html401-19991224/struct/text.html#edef-PRE). <pre> is a block-level element, which means that it can be a direct replacement for a <div> element. And even though "[a]uthors are discouraged from altering this behavior through style sheets," it is certainly possible to do so. So, rather than marking a poem as <div class="poem | poetry"> I recommend marking it as <pre class="poem | poetry">. In a user agent that respects style sheets you can override the default 'pre' presentation just as easily as you could if you were using the <div> element, but on older user agents (such as the "Kindle Klassic") the text would gracefully degrade to something at least acceptable, even if not very satisfying. Other comments: While a verse or stanza in a poem is certainly analogous to a paragraph, it is nonetheless not one. You should use <div class="stanza"> for that purpose, not <div class="poem"><p>. I don't understand why you would use a horizontal rule in a poem as "a hard return" (whatever that means). Personally, I like short, centered horizontal rules as dingbats, but seeing a horizontal rule in a poem is jarring. Additionally, the old MobiPocket Reader (and presumably the old Kindles, although I can't say for sure) co-opted the horizontal rule to mean a page break, so poetry in that context could be broken up in very strange ways. Other than that, I think your style sheet is largely irrelevant; it is almost certain that I will replace your preferred styles with my own. Markup, even for poetry, needs to be designed in such a way that it tolerates swapping styles. Therefore, the focus needs to be on the actual markup, and not the associated style sheet.