Re: RE two PREs

timbl (Tim Berners-Lee)
Date: Fri, 18 Jun 93 08:23:12 MET DST
From: timbl (Tim Berners-Lee)
Message-id: <9306180623.AA22914@ nxoc01.cern.ch >
To: terry@ora.com, www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch
Subject: Re: RE two PREs
PRE was deigned to address a very specific problem:
putting in information which had been PREformatted
in all kinds of ways (tables, diagrams included) using
plain ASCII text, in the assumption of fixed-width
characters.

PRE MUST always be displayed using fixed width characters:
indeed, even when <B>old has been turned on, if a bold
font can't be found with the same pitch, then bold should
not be shown. [Recent usergripe that his formatting was
all off becuase he used bold ina PRE].

Poetry is somethingdifferent altogether.  It is less
obvious that you ned to have significant newlines, especially
as lines in powetry can wrap.  I would suggest for HTML+
an element for poetry and elements for verses, with
lines being paragraphs within the verse, for example.
But mark it up.

Tim