HI Lee, Your continuous references to reading devices is interesting. It shows one very important point that the HTML-standard is not well implemented or not fully implemented on such devices. What it does show is that using complex style of mark-up (semantic mark-up) is a very bad idea! Inorder to achieve a better visual presentation it would be more appropriate to use just <p>. I know this is disconcerting to you. Yet, as far as visual layout is concerned it is actually all that is needed. Agreed that source looks ugly, and is not easy to read, but it will do the trick! I believe you were around during the browser wars, were you could write beautiful HTML for one browser, yet on another all you had was junk! Well, we have the same situation with the reading devices. So, what did one do to have your pages work in different devices! You stayed basic! The same principle should apply, today, for ebooks. regards Keith. Am 19.02.2012 um 22:25 schrieb Lee Passey:
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. _______________________________________________ gutvol-d mailing list gutvol-d@lists.pglaf.org http://lists.pglaf.org/mailman/listinfo/gutvol-d