************************ A Poem Element for HTML5 ************************ *************************** Twinkle Twinkle Little Star *************************** -------------------- by Jane Taylor, 1806 -------------------- Twinkle, twinkle, little star, How I wonder what you are! Up above the world so high, Like a diamond in the sky! When the blazing sun is gone, When he nothing shines upon, Then you show your little light, Twinkle, twinkle, all the night. Then the traveller in the dark, Thanks you for your tiny spark, He could not see which way to go, If you did not twinkle so. In the dark blue sky you keep, And often through my curtains peep, For you never shut your eye, Till the sun is in the sky. As your bright and tiny spark, Lights the traveller in the dark,— Though I know not what you are, Twinkle, twinkle, little star. Sorry Dr Hoffmann. Maybe we should all stick to prose. Twinkle Twinkle Little Star by Jane Taylor, 1806 Twinkle, twinkle, little star, How I wonder what you are! Up above the world so high, Like a diamond in the sky! When the blazing sun is gone, When he nothing shines upon, Then you show your little light, Twinkle, twinkle, all the night. Then the traveller in the dark, Thanks you for your tiny spark, He could not see which way to go, If you did not twinkle so. In the dark blue sky you keep, And often through my curtains peep, For you never shut your eye, Till the sun is in the sky. As your bright and tiny spark, Lights the traveller in the dark,— Though I know not what you are, Twinkle, twinkle, little star. What I missed so many years in (X)HTML is some useful markup for poems. The result we can see in the 'real web life' - a lot of meaningless tag soup around, disoriented authors lost between silence and semantically meaningless markup... Obviously poem markup is still not available in 'HTML 5'. Why not? Can this be added to the 'HTML 5' draft? It is pretty nice to have something like 'section, 'article', 'header' in 'HTML 5' (why not a generic heading element as h from XHTML2 by the way? This would be pretty useful for poems as well as for larger projects as anthologies, books or general content fragments joint together for example with server sided scripts as PHP). Some useful and usable markup for poetry is still missing. If someone really tries to markup a poem today, one ends up with a div-class-tag-soup-nonsense. And there are many authors out there publishing poetry only in the web, currently without having any sufficient markup elements in (X)HTML for this. According to my observation readers of poetry and general literature have a wide range of capabilities (a lot of readers of poetry are robots from search engine for example ;o) Therefore it is quite useful to markup those type of literature to make elements with a semantic meaning accessible for authors in (X)HTML and to simplify the identification of poetry for readers. I think, it is the main purpose of a 'Text Markup Language' as (X)HTML to markup text in a semantic way, isn't it? Poems are text - lets markup it now ;o) Some useful elements (block elements): 'poem' - container for a poem, similar to a section, may contain header, footer, div, p (maybe useful for modern poetry), strophe, line, h 'strophe' - stanza or strophe of a classical poem, may contain either line or (inline elements or CDATA) 'line' - a line or row of a poem, may contain inline elements or CDATA 'h' - a heading of a poem I think such a construction covers already many types of poems. For non-classical as for example concrete poetry this is maybe sufficient too, still div or p can be used to realize non-conventional content.