Re: Poetry in HTML (was: HTML+ Comments)

Bill Janssen (janssen@parc.xerox.com)
Wed, 21 Jul 1993 11:24:15 PDT


I wish I could resist this one, but...

The real semantic markup for a Peter's not-really-a-haiku would be

<haiku><first-haiku-line>I think
that</first-haiku-line><second-haiku-line>this
looks</second-haiku-line><third-haiku-line>much
better</third-haiku-line></haiku>

This pleading for hard line breaks is all nonsense, special pleading to
allow just this one oh-so-necessary bit of procedural markup. This
slippery slope leads to Postscript!!!

(Ah, that feels better :-)#

That being said, Peter's suggestion to allow <p poem>, etc., sounds
quite reasonable to me. It should be clear, though, that no special
handling of line breaks within such a markup is promised, but that
browsers that know the meaning of the paragraph modifiers may "do the
right thing".

Bill