Re: SVG as a safe format for POETS (and any other needing un-reflowable, but resizable, text design)

Hello,

indeed, because (X)HTML has no specific elements for poetry, there remains 
typically the div element to markup poetry (in HTML5 or definition lists in 
other variants of (X)HTML).
Compared to text in SVG there is no big semantical advantage in using (X)HTML.
In SVG tiny 1.2 one can use the RDFa related attributes, in SVG 1.1 the 
metadata element to reference what is semantically intended.
For this purpose (and in general to markup texts properly) I developed the
XML format LML:
http://purl.oclc.org/net/hoffmann/lml/

Well and I have a (german) article describing how to markup poetry in
different formats, including SVG, XHTML and LML.
Indeed, often SVG is pretty useful to do this.
One only has to keep in mind, to do it in such a way, that the idea or
text alternative remains accessible and understandable in case, a user
cannot take advantage of the graphical representation.
But because SVG has several features to provide a text alternative,
this is typically no big problem.

To write poetry in SVG, XHTML or LML one needs only a text editor,
this is the typical approach to create such documents for me.
No specific tool, application, editor required. One can simply write
down, what is intended ;o)

I use SVG as well (alternatively/additionally XHTML) for the output
of a PHP generated photo gallery including some text output.
It turns out as well, that this approach is much more useful than using
(only) XHTML for such an application - therefore there are several
applications, SVG can replace XHTML in situations graphically, semantically or
otherwise beyond the capabilities of XHTML(+CSS). In general for all these
applications one does not need specific tools, but server sided scripts like
PHP can sometimes help to calculate positions and required sizes or
relations of different objects.

Olaf

Received on Tuesday, 5 July 2011 14:02:59 UTC