As it says in the "Snark": “What’s the good of Mercator’s North Poles and Equators,  Tropics, Zones, and Meridian Lines?” So the Bellman would cry: and the crew would reply  “They are merely conventional signs! Ditto markup: merely conventional signs. ;-) The discussion is fascinating. About nine months back, I got seriously interested in TEI, and was looking at converting all my ebooks to TEI. Among a number of stumbling blocks I encountered was this question of what to do with poetry. Probably, I lack suffucuent energy or interest, or possibly time -- always a great excuse. But I regret to say that I gave up at this point. But during my "research" into the poetry question, I wondered aloud on the TEI list whether there were identified verse structures which could/should be used in markup. E.g. sonnets and limericks seem to have a generally accepted layout, so maybe there were other forms too. Unfortunately, possibly because I didn't pay attention in school, I am rather ignorant about such things. Unfortunately, no one else on that list seemed to know either. Now, someone here just posted an example which began: <lg type="limerick"> ... and for TEI's purposes, that's probably enough. (Although TEI has the rend attribute, TEI is actually pretty weak on the presentational side -- not just my opinion, but that of many experts on the TEI list.) Unfortunately, it is not possible to define a CSS style which will translate "limerick" into the desired presentation. In my HTML, I've used the em-space entity to indent lines where necessary. It's the easy way out, I know, but somehow I can't stomach the mess that results from <l rend="indent2"> etc. Steve -- Stephen Thomas, Senior Systems Analyst, Adelaide University Library ADELAIDE UNIVERSITY SA 5005 AUSTRALIA Tel: +61 8 8303 5190 Fax: +61 8 8303 4369 Email: stephen.thomas@adelaide.edu.au URL: http://staff.library.adelaide.edu.au/~sthomas/