I look after a poetry ezine site ( http://www.foame.org/) and that¹s what I do.
For a lot of poets, the look of their poem on the page is very important. Sometimes they want to make visual patterns with their stanzas ... always a bit hit and miss, depending on browsers/platforms etc. And then you get the poems with lines that are required to start under a specific word in the previous line have had to make use of a lot of non-breaking spaces to do that, and again it can¹t be precise. - susie On 20/6/08 2:42 AM, "jody tate" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I'd stress what Jon Tan wrote: "My recommendation would be <p> for stanzas > and <br /> line breaks for most verse." Stanzas are usually taught as the > paragraph of poetry and verses are referred to as line breaks. > > Side note you're free to ignore: I'd argue most of the historical bits below > are incorrect in the details, but are correct in general. Jonson's _English > Grammar_ is a great snapshot of the period's grammar eccentricities, but > hardly a guide that was followed--he didn't care enough to publish it while > alive despite how careful he was about publication (I did a Ph.D. one > Shakespeare and taught medieval, early modern and modern poetry for eight > years before the siren call of web work). > > -jody > > -- > Jody Tate > Web Developer - UW Network Systems > http://staff.washington.edu/jtate/ > > > On Jun 19, 2008, at 3:06 AM, Jon Tan wrote: > >> Historically each stanza in a poem is a paragraph. Layout (new lines) began >> punctuating paragraphs in the later Middle Ages. Prior to that the lines ran >> into one another with punctuation used to indicate where breaths and breaks >> in the running text occurred [1]. Syntactic punctuation was not commonplace >> until after Ben Johnson's English Grammar in 1640. That means that layout >> /is/ punctuation for modern poetry, so markup needs to reflect that. My >> recommendation would be <p> for stanzas and <br /> line breaks for most >> verse. To do anything that returns stanzas to running text when CSS is >> disabled would break the syntax of the verse /unless/ lines are specifically >> punctuated with something other than a break at the end; a comma for example. >> <pre> is an alternative but does not punctuate line ends at all, except >> visually. It would be interesting to know how alternative browsers handle >> both <br />s and single/double line breaks in <pre> blocks. Do they inject a >> pause or other aural boundary? > > > > > > > > > > > ******************************************************************* > List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm > Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm > Help: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > ******************************************************************* ******************************************************************* List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm Help: [EMAIL PROTECTED] *******************************************************************
