Poetry and Maths

Peter Lister, Cranfield Computer Centre (ccprl@xdm001.ccc.cranfield.ac.uk)
Tue, 25 May 93 14:34:40 BST


Much opinion seems to be that line and page breaks are against the
spirit of HTML. I disagree, as I think there are cases where some
information of this sort is vital to a document.

It came to me last night that the obvious example is poetry. To quote a
poem in an HTML document, how does the WWW suggest that HTML should get
the line breaks in the right place? <p> is suitable between verses, but
between lines. I really don't see that adding <newline> will cause
problems. Similarly, I think that page breaks between poems are
entirely suitable; all the anthologies I possess are one (maximum 2)
poems per page, and there's alot of whitespace.

BTW, would it make a difference using &NEWLINE; and &NEWPAGE; elements
instead of tags? I can't comment on the pros and cons, but I note that
e.g. DECwrite SGML uses elements, not tags.

Sigh. Here come the flames. :-)

This brought me on to mathematical expressions. There is real
requirement for these in technical documents, and at the moment all I
can do is include a bitmapped image screen dump in a document, or link
a dvi document containing a compiled TeX expression and hope that the
browsing end has xdvi. Not good when the TeX source is circa twenty
bytes. What's the general opinion?

Peter Lister p.lister@cranfield.ac.uk
Computer Centre,
Cranfield Institute of Technology, Voice: +44 234 754200 ext 2828
Cranfield, Bedfordshire MK43 0AL England Fax: +44 234 750875