Re: Poetry and Maths

Dave_Raggett <dsr@hplb.hpl.hp.com>
From: Dave_Raggett <dsr@hplb.hpl.hp.com>
Message-id: <9305261554.AA03031@manuel.hpl.hp.com>
Subject: Re: Poetry and Maths
To: www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch
Date: Wed, 26 May 93 16:54:54 BST
Cc: ccprl@xdm001.ccc.cranfield.ac.uk
Mailer: Elm [revision: 66.36.1.1]
> Much opinion seems to be that line and page breaks are against the
> spirit of HTML. I disagree, as I think there are cases where some
> information of this sort is vital to a document.

> It came to me last night that the obvious example is poetry. To quote a
> poem in an HTML document, how does the WWW suggest that HTML should get
> the line breaks in the right place? <p> is suitable between verses, but
> between lines. I really don't see that adding <newline> will cause
> problems. Similarly, I think that page breaks between poems are
> entirely suitable; all the anthologies I possess are one (maximum 2)
> poems per page, and there's alot of whitespace.

Yes its nice to know that other people are interested in markup for poetry
too! My suggestion is a new tag <POEM> which preserves line breaks and
that browsers are recommended to use a left indent. The <p> tag is
permitted in <POEM> ... </POEM> along with inline emphasis.

As for maths etc. I feel that we should encourage embedding of specialised
formats in the same spirit as pictures. That way HTML remains simple, while
making it practical to independently evolve other formats for specialised
purposes.

HTML MUSTN'T BECOME ALL THINGS TO ALL PEOPLE!

Dave Raggett