Re: 'HTML 5' and some poem markup?

Dr. Olaf Hoffmann wrote:
>>> 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) 

I don't understand how readers would benefit from a poem element. Is 
there some special UA behavior you imagine? For example, the <aside> 
element might be read out-of-order in a speech browser or hidden unless 
specifically opened on a small-screen browser. What are the 
corresponding possibilities for a <poem> element that would allow 
similar improvements for the user experience?

>>> (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.

Unfortunately depending on the use of explicit semantics in this way 
doesn't seem to work so well in practice. In this case I would imagine 
that the biggest problem would be search engines only picking up the 
small fraction of total poetry marked as <poem>, thus making such a 
facility too unhelpful to be worth deploying, although one can imagine 
problems with e.g. spam, for example, spammers swamping the relatively 
small amount of poetry content with much more rubbish.

-- 
"Mixed up signals
Bullet train
People snuffed out in the brutal rain"
--Conner Oberst

Received on Friday, 5 October 2007 18:49:57 UTC