Re: draft HTML5: Techniques for the provision of text alternatives

>> 
>> Smylers: 'HTML is too rudimentary to mark up poems precisely -- among
>> many other things.'
>> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2008Feb/0392.html
>
>Hi Olaf.  To clarify, I think that HTML5 is absolutely fine for marking
>up poetry, literature, and other text; I did not intend my quote above
>to be interpreted as an argument against that.
>
>I acknowledge that poems can't be marked up _precisely_ (that is, in a
>way which denotes lines and verses) with HTML5.  But most instances of
>poems on webpages have no need of such fine-grained mark-up; in which
>case HTML5 does just fine.
>
>Apologies for any confusion.
>
>Smylers

Really? There is the usage of dl/dt/dd for poetry in HTML4 (what is indeed
not very nice) and pre (I tried for some of my poems with visual appearence,
but this did never work, therefore initially I used inaccessible GIFs and 
now I use SVG) and then you can use div, in HTML5 maybe section+div,
but all this is already discussed on the wiki page. And non of them provide
an information itself, that the content is a poem, this might be only a
conclusion from the visual appearence for some audience, if they recognise 
a visual appearence and it is a classical poem and the author styled it to
look like a typical classical poem in the cultural environment of the 
audience ;o) With the same chain or arguments you can remove headings,
lists, tables from HTML5, just because clever authors can provide some
visual appearance that looks like the intended structure with almost any
kind of tag soup and maybe some CSS.
Indeed, this was already the method with mechanical typewriters I started
to write literature. Now I have several computers and I would like to have
some benefit from this technical progress (because the mechanical
typewriter still exists and works and some computers already died, the aspect
of a technical progress might be questionable itself, however ;o) 

And to make at least some relation to the topic - I would like to share those
benefits with others, which are using computers as a chance to get a better or
easier understanding and access to texts, images and so on, not available for
all the literature and visual poetry I realised on the typewriter and the 
photographs I did with my camera in these days and so on.
And I cannot see, that this really works, if HTML does not provide much more
than the mechanical typewriter, glue and a photographic print.

Olaf

Received on Wednesday, 20 January 2010 19:59:08 UTC