Re: 'HTML 5' and some poem markup?

Dr. Olaf Hoffmann wrote:


> As you can see, the limits you try to set are very 
> arbitrary and not much related to the language we are
> talking about. 

With respect, I did not propose (or argue in favour
of) <audio>, <video>, <canvas> [1], nor did I reject
SMIL : all I tried to suggest was that there are
a finite number of universes of discourse for which
HTML as-is is perfectly suited, and that whilst
I have every sympathy for your wish to be able to
mark up a poem in some future dialect of HTML, I would
have equal sympathy for those wishing to mark up plays,
chemical formulae, contracts and so on ...

And since it is clearly unreasonable to expect HTML
to be extended to natively support not only these
domains but the potentially infinite number of other
domains that have not been enumerated, it is
(IMHO) better to define a domain-based extension
mechanism (such as RDFa, as referred to by
Peter Krantz) through which you can define the exact
set of elements that you need to mark up poetry,
allowing others can define the exact set of elements
that each needs for his or her particular universe of
discourse.

Philip TAYLOR
--------
[1] Which is not to say that I necessarily believe
that these are bad ideas; rather they are orthogonal
to the subject under discussion, since it is by no
means unreasonable to imagine that an /avant garde/ poet
might wish to use one or more of these in the presentation
of his or her contemporary verse.

Received on Friday, 5 October 2007 20:28:40 UTC