Re: 'HTML 5' and some poem markup?

Hi, Dr. O-

I'd like to note that in addition to poetry, the same solution could be 
applied to song lyrics, which are very widespread content on the Web. 
There are many sites devoted to nothing else, and sites like MySpace 
(and many blogs) have a lot of lyrical content.

I personally favor the idea of loosening up the definition of <p> into 
just that of a block of text (since the idea of a paragraph is not 
universal among natural-language orthographies), and using some other 
semantic system to annotate specialities of written language (where you 
could, for example, choose between a simple poetry markup and a more 
complex one that notates free verse or  sonnets or even structural 
elements of iambic pentameter).  This might be RDFa, or spans marked 
with microformats tags.  You'll be able to get much more precision than 
with a blunt tool like HTML.

Including lyrics in the category of poetry does make explicit a couple 
of interesting technological/processing aspects, thought:

1) guitar tabs (or other musical notation) could be integrated using ruby;

2) timed text (as for karaoke) could be used to add meter and rhythm to 
the presentation style (think SMIL or HTML+Time).

And, of course, as you point out, giving special consideration to 
particular types of content (such as poetic or lyrical) aids in its 
categorization or aggregation.

Regards-
-Doug Schepers
W3C Staff Contact, SVG, CDF, and WebAPI

Received on Friday, 5 October 2007 20:05:17 UTC