'HTML 5' and some poem markup?

What I missed so many years in (X)HTML is
some useful markup for poems.
The result we can see in the 'real web life' -
a lot of meaningless tag soup around,
disoriented authors lost between silence
and semantically meaningless markup...
Obviously poem markup is still not available
in 'HTML 5'. Why not? Can this be added
to the 'HTML 5' draft?

It is pretty nice to have something
like 'section, 'article', 'header'
in 'HTML 5' (why not a generic heading
element as h from XHTML2 by the way?
This would be pretty useful for poems as
well as for larger projects as anthologies,
books or general content fragments joint 
together for example with server sided scripts 
as PHP).
Some useful and usable markup for
poetry is still missing. If someone really
tries to markup a poem today, one ends
up with a div-class-tag-soup-nonsense.
And there are many authors out there
publishing poetry only in the web, currently
without having any sufficient markup elements
in (X)HTML for this.
According to my observation readers of poetry
and general literature have a wide range of
capabilities (a lot of readers of poetry are
robots from search engine for example ;o)
Therefore it is quite useful to markup those
type of literature to make elements with a 
semantic meaning accessible for authors in (X)HTML 
and to simplify the identification of poetry for readers.
I think, it is the main purpose of a 'Text Markup
Language' as (X)HTML to markup text in a 
semantic way, isn't it? Poems are text - lets 
markup it now ;o)

Some useful elements (block elements):

'poem' - container for a poem, similar to a section,
         may contain header, footer, div, p (maybe
         useful for modern poetry), strophe, line, h
'strophe' - stanza or strophe of a classical poem,
            may contain either line or 
            (inline elements or CDATA)
'line' - a line or row of a poem, may contain inline
         elements or CDATA
'h' - a heading of a poem


I think such a construction covers already many types
of poems. For non-classical as for example concrete
poetry this is maybe sufficient too, still div or
p can be used to realize non-conventional content.

Received on Friday, 5 October 2007 13:49:30 UTC