I'm just going to play devil's advocate one last time here then shut up.
On 6/25/06, Brion Vibber <brion(a)pobox.com> wrote:
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 general text.
That sounds like a useful thing in many situations other than poetry.
I'll stipulate a <preserveformatting> tag.
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.
...which could be wrapped in a <div class="poem"> tag via a {{poem}}
template.
The one thing I notice is we don't have a good way with dealing with
blocks of text. {{temp-start}} / {{temp-end}} templates are apparently
deprecated, and {{temp|huge block of text that covers several lines
and includes tables, templates and all manner of crud}} templates have
limitations. Does this mean that the only way to create new block
elements (like poems, recipes, source code...) is by defining new
elements in the Wiki-markup language itself? That seems like a pity.
Steve