[Newspoetry] poetry-friendly HTML

[Joe Futrelle]

Hello Newspoets,

Dirk brought up a nagging problem with HTML vis a vis poetry; if your
poem has very long lines like "Bin Laden Explained!", browsers wrap
them to the beginning of the next line, ruining the effect of the line
breaks.

In print, poets can indent all but the first line of a very long line
to aid the hapless reader.  But vanilla HTML has no way of doing this.

There is a solution, however, using Cascading Stylesheets (CSS).  A
little snippet of CSS code is inserted at the head of the HTML
document and then the poem and each line are linked to the style
descriptions with special attributes on HTML P and DIV tags.

This is what I'll do for any long-lined poems I get from here on out
unless someone specifically wants to do it differently.  For an
example see "Bin Laden Explained!"
(http://www.newspoetry.com/cgi-bin/ref?yr=2001&mo=2&day=10); I've
updated it to use the new CSS trick.

P.S. Newspoetry reserves are running low!  Please send in poems ASAP
or you'll be forced to read more of my poetry!!

--
Joe Futrelle
editor-as-if-chief
Newspoetry dot calm