bob said:

1. Is there an obvious reason not to use:

well, that won't work on a kindle... at least it wouldn't a year ago, but i haven't checked to verify it lately. and what works on those old kindles -- some funky "width" statement -- won't work on anything else, which is why i view all of the "conversions" as ok-now-but-maybe-not-next-week _temporary_ solutions. i think it's a mistake to try to aim for some write-once-read-everywhere solution, because it's probably _not_ even possible, especially since we're aiming at many different targets that are moving even as we shoot at them. of course, my z.m.l. approach is able to accommodate such a workflow, as it is maximally flexible and extensible. *** jana said:

None that I know of. Some of us do just that, for the reason you state. (;

poetry markup is just one of the many topics on this list's merry-go-round... and it seemed to me that it musta been very close to exactly one year ago that we were discussing it, since it was when i was coding an online text-to-html tool (which is another perennial topic here). so i looked it up, and yes, indeed, it was february 24th when jana recommended that i look at her work on p.g. #35312...

http://lists.pglaf.org/mailman/private/gutvol-d/2011-February/007565.html

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/35312

i did, and was surprised to find that it was full of flaws, in my humble opinion, not just in the .mobi and the .epub, but even in the .html displayed in a browser, and so i shared my description of them. and i just looked at the file again, to see if jana had fixed the flaws. nope; still there. oh well. perhaps they'll be fixed by the time y'all discuss this same topic _next_ february. -bowerbird