Semantic poetry
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Probably more a question of semantics than accessibility, but I've been pondering how best to mark up some poetry.
I was thinking to use p to mark up each verse, with lines separated within the verse by br.
eg:
| Code: |
| <p>I walked about as though I were a solitary cumulus<br />
that would go up mountains and down valley sides<br /> when blah de blah something or other that scans<br /> and tum-te-tum te something else that fills the line appropriately</p> |
Or is there a better way of doing it than that?
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Jack Pickard The Pickards Information Services| Blog | Twit
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It's what I'd do. But then I have never seen the objection to the odd judiciously used <br> when breaks are required in a <p> purely for presentational reasons.
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One reason is you can't be sure of the text size the user is using. So the placement of your line break may not end up as judicious as you wanted. 
JackP, that seems perfect to me if it has been written by the author(s) of the page. If it is quoted from some other source, wrapping the whole thing in <blockquote> would be good.
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My CV type thing and my Life of Ben (Blog). Nigel Peck's Accessify Forum Requirements.
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Use <br> for lines where there is no natural break and use <p> for lines where there is._________________
Mike Abbott
Accessible to everyone
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Depending on the type of poem, and how important spacing is, you could also consider using <pre>. The HTML 4.01 specs actually cite a verse of Shelley as an example of the use of the <pre> element.
I don't think that there is any single "correct" way to code poetry in X/HTML. <p> plus <br />, <pre>, or <blockquote> each make sense in specific contexts, and with specific kinds of poems. And none of them is really an ideal method.
If you are interested in researching other techniques, I would recommend taking a look at the rather elaborate Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). Here is a link to a section that discusses the coding of verse: TEI P5 - 5. Verse. To make practical use of this method, however, you would have to encode the poem into XML using the TEI dtd, and then invoke an XML translator to turn it into X/HTML when serving the page to site visitors...
Phil.
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| pkiff wrote: |
| [...] and then invoke an XML translator to turn it into X/HTML when serving the page to site visitors... |
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My CV type thing and my Life of Ben (Blog). Nigel Peck's Accessify Forum Requirements.
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| Cerbera wrote: | ||
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As for the possible reasons for coding a text using the TEI standard and then formatting it as something else. Well, theoretically, it would be possible to have a site that dynamically produced X/HTML versions of poems based on user settings or choices, and some of those choices could conceivably be oriented towards assistive technology. For example, (and here we are in the land of pipe-dreams), one could theoretically find methods of visually displaying rhyme schemes of a poem that had been coded in TEI. Or methods of textually encoding visual spacing in ways that could be understood by a screen reader user. And since the TEI is an established coding scheme, there is a possibility that someone at a university library somewhere may be working on a translation engine or XSLT code that would do most of the work and require only minimum tweaking from someone familiar with the assistive technology that might be used to access such texts. It would also be possible, potentially, that some poems have already been converted into TEI code....
But mostly I just mentioned the TEI as a coding reference that may be of interest to anyone who is thinking about the possibilities and limitations of coding poetry.
Later: I almost forgot, if the original poster wants to stick with fairly straightforward X/HTML+CSS, then here is an idea to consider:
2.3.4 Indent or center verse quotations - The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web
Phil.
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| Cerbera wrote: | ||
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Digital preservation - your archived digital file should (ideally) contain as much information as possible to reproduce the artifact that it's copying. An analogy might be digital scans of our Victorian and Georgian prints. Those are stored as hi-res tiffs, but compressed to jpeg for delivery over the web.
We have one site which delivers TEI documents as HTML:
http://www.nmm.ac.uk/...
Mind you, all modern browsers can handle XML. Try this XML page as a test. So if you have an archive of TEI documents, you could always experiment with delivering TEI straight to the browser, using CSS to control the look. I'm not sure how well that would work in reality, or how assistive technology would handle the page.
Edit: On second thoughts, bad example. He's using XSL, not CSS, to style the page, so it's transformed to XHTML by the browser.
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Jim O'Donnell
work: Royal Observatory Greenwich
play: eatyourgreens
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