On Sun, Jun 25, 2006 at 01:28:46PM -0700, Brion Vibber wrote:
Jay R. Ashworth wrote:
On Sun, Jun 25, 2006 at 12:14:06PM -0600, Chad
Perrin wrote:
[snip way too much text]
Let me summarize what <poem> does, how, and why. <poem> does two
things:
1) It *modifies the behavior* of wiki syntax within its borders to
preserve line breaks and initial whitespace in a different way from
Aha.
A CSS class by itself is insufficient to do this due
to the
transformations done in wikitext processing, so the extension
preprocesses the input to allow the "natural" way of pasting in
poem-like text to work.
Yes.
2) It *marks* the contents with a distinct style class
('poem') which
allows distinct styling to be applied to all <poem>s via the global
style sheet.
Ok; I thought you'd said that; thanks for confirming.
Further, a quick note about HTML. Plain old HTML
contains a lot of
often-forgotten semantic elements, such as:
<abbr acronym address code dfn kbd q samp var >
Some of those are supported in our wikitext because UseMod supported
them; others we've never added. But in general, you can note that
they often would not necessarily have distinct default styles.
<samp>, <kbd> and <code> usually all render in a monospaced font,
like <tt>. But they don't have to, and using distinct elements allows
you to style them consistently, or to treat them differently when
machine-extracting data. etc.
The set of semantic elements in HTML hints at its creation in a
physics research lab full of computer geeks. It has excellent coverage
for writing software manuals and project summary pages, but more
limited coverage for, say, literature.
Our wiki text has a strong affinity with HTML; we render to it, we
allow subsets of it, etc. But we aren't HTML exactly, and where
our needs differ it is fully appropriate to have distinct semantic
elements.
Nicely put, and confirms what I'd been thinking (which is nice, cause
sometimes the sky in my world is a different color. :-)
Cheers,
-- jra
--
Jay R. Ashworth jra(a)baylink.com
Designer Baylink RFC 2100
Ashworth & Associates The Things I Think '87 e24
St Petersburg FL USA
http://baylink.pitas.com +1 727 647 1274
A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
A: Top-posting.
Q: What is the most annoying thing on Usenet and in e-mail?