Re: 'HTML 5' and some poem markup?

> On Oct 5, 2007, at 16:37, Dr. Olaf Hoffmann wrote:
> > What I missed so many years in (X)HTML is
> > some useful markup for poems.
>
> There's <p> for each stanza and <br> for separating lines.

In 'HTML 5' is noted:
'The p element represents a paragraph.'

The semantic meaning of a paragraph
is much different from a strophe or stanza 
(see wikipedia or an encyclopedia of your
preference).

In 'HTML 5' is noted:
'The br element represents a line break.'

Well it does not present a line of a poem, just a line break,
this has more to do with styling, not with the semantical
meaning of a line in a strophe of a poem...

Therefore authors should not use p or br to markup
poems, better to use div, because there is no markup
specific 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...
>
> Are there use case where software that consumes markup would benefit
> from poem-specific semantics?

Authors and readers will have benefit from this.
Without markup on quality poems in HTML 5 - 
then it is maybe better still to use LATEX, it has a
verse element ;o) 


>
> > (why not a generic heading
> > element as h from XHTML2 by the way?
>
> <h> would not be backwards-compatible and you'd have to define
> interaction with the <h1> through <h6>. HTML5 specifies <h1> in such
> a way that can used the way <h> can be used in XHTML2.
>

Well, new elements like embed, audio, video or canvas are not
backwards compatible either, following this argument they 
have to be replaced with object.
Or you have to add a name-space prefix for SMIL to audio and 
video to get it backwards compatible.
video or audio have a more specific semantic meaning as object,
therefore it is useful to have them. A h element still contains only 
text, accessible still with HTML1 capabale browsers.


> > (a lot of readers of poetry are
> > robots from search engine for example ;o)
>
> How would they be helped by poem-specific semantics?

If someone is looking for poems in results from a seach engine 
the search engine can be more selective just looking at the 
semantics. There are search engines for images or maybe
video/audio, why not for poems?
Anyway even for robots maybe the days will come they
learn to distinguish between different contents and this will
be pretty simpler with semantic markup as with div-class-tag-soup.

Received on Friday, 5 October 2007 15:48:05 UTC