Re: CSS for poetry?

Rob Stevenson <donutmachine (AT) ns (DOT) aliantzinc.ca> wrote...

There are lots of new possibilities in the CSS3 spec, but most browsers
don't support them yet, and most users won't have browsers that support
them any time soon. So I was wondering if anyone has worked out clever
bits of CSS to help lay out poems on the web.

Unfortunately this is a long-standing problem, and it has no good
solution with present-day CSS as far as I have been able to determine.
One prior discussion of it is here:

http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=e...61cf7f9&rnum=1

The cause of the problem was a conceptual breakdown in the thinking
behind the earliest versions of HTML. There never should have been a
<BR> element, which isn't an element at all but a stand-in for a
carriage return. The *element* that should have been in HTML from the
beginning was <LINE></LINE>, but it doesn't exist. Without a <LINE>
element there isn't any way to reliably use CSS to style poetry. We
fall back to unstyled, monospace <PRE> elements, which are pretty
poor, or putting every single line into a div or span.

A related problem with poetry is that poems are conventionally set
flush left within their own text block but that text block is centered
on the measure, and this is another thing that isn't cleanly possible
in CSS, although it is perfectly ordinary typography. There are clunky
work-arounds but nothing elegant.

Here's a poetry page I worked on for a while. I haven't examined it in
a long time, so probably should inspect the layout on a variety of
newer browsers:

http://rjohara.net/teaching/uncg/bio105poems.html

Bob O'Hara (http://rjohara.net)

In article <bd882d31.0307162144.e80a01b (AT) posting (DOT) google.com>, Robert J.
O'Hara wrote:

A related problem with poetry is that poems are conventionally set
flush left within their own text block but that text block is centered
on the measure, and this is another thing that isn't cleanly possible
in CSS, although it is perfectly ordinary typography. There are clunky
work-arounds but nothing elegant.

The display:table;margin:auto; way is IMO good enaugh, but problem is IE,
as usual. (inline-table and inline-block are nice too)

--
Lauri Raittila <http://www.iki.fi/lr> <http://www.iki.fi/zwak/fonts>
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