Sorry for crossposting this. It felt wikisource-l was the most appropriate list, but since the topic has been discussed a lot in wikitech-l it seemed reasonable to post it there, too.
I agree the poem-tag makes life easier on wikisource, it saves loads of time when putting poems there. I wonder if it would be a good idea to add another semantic tag - that for the "intro" text, before the actual poem. Sometimes there is none but usually there is the name of the poem and/or the name of the author, and sometimes a little extra info.
Att small wikisources, this little intro - like most texts on the wikis - are often in plain text. When the poem tag is applied, it does not look so good. The result is like this http://sv.wikisource.org/wiki/Till_min_far With no difference in indentation or font, it is kind of difficult to see where the intro text ends and the poem starts especially if we imagine a very short intro. It is not appealing to the eye. One could add extra blank lines, that would work, but on most wikis that method seems to be frowned upon. English wikisource has a set of templates for fomatting the "intro" part - here is an example. http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/That_Day So now, at least at Swedish Wikisource experiments with similar templates have been started. That is an option, but adding a semantic tag resulting in the need of templates seems a bit awkward to me.
What is the solution here, for the wikis that do not already have these elaborate templates? One could do some wiki-specific adaptation to the poem tag, so that it adds blank spaces above the poem - that is however not so nifty when there actually is no "intro". Should we ask to get another semantic tag for the intro? Or is templates, like at English Wikisource, the major solution?
/habj
On 7/24/06, habj sweetadelaide@gmail.com wrote:
Sorry for crossposting this. It felt wikisource-l was the most appropriate list, but since the topic has been discussed a lot in wikitech-l it seemed reasonable to post it there, too.
I agree the poem-tag makes life easier on wikisource, it saves loads of time when putting poems there. I wonder if it would be a good idea to add another semantic tag - that for the "intro" text, before the actual poem. Sometimes there is none but usually there is the name of the poem and/or the name of the author, and sometimes a little extra info.
Att small wikisources, this little intro - like most texts on the wikis - are often in plain text. When the poem tag is applied, it does not look so good. The result is like this http://sv.wikisource.org/wiki/Till_min_far With no difference in indentation or font, it is kind of difficult to see where the intro text ends and the poem starts especially if we imagine a very short intro. It is not appealing to the eye. One could add extra blank lines, that would work, but on most wikis that method seems to be frowned upon. English wikisource has a set of templates for fomatting the "intro" part - here is an example. http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/That_Day So now, at least at Swedish Wikisource experiments with similar templates have been started. That is an option, but adding a semantic tag resulting in the need of templates seems a bit awkward to me.
What is the solution here, for the wikis that do not already have these elaborate templates? One could do some wiki-specific adaptation to the poem tag, so that it adds blank spaces above the poem - that is however not so nifty when there actually is no "intro". Should we ask to get another semantic tag for the intro? Or is templates, like at English Wikisource, the major solution?
/habj
Personally, I think <poem> should be kept as simple as possible and shouldn't be changed. And I don't think it's necessary to have a new semantic tag created for merely a specific type of literature--it seems to be quite a lot of work for only a small feature. However, I can offer a number of solutions:
1. A new semantic tag (always an option, although I don't believe it will happen) 2. Use for dashes ("----") right below the intro to separate it from the body of the poem. 3. Use h3 headers for introductory material ("===INTRO===") or use font formatting (maybe make the text italic or bold) 4. Use templates
My (strong) suggestion would be to use templates, as they offer a wide array of presentation variations, and can be easily changed if you want to change around the layout later on. Especially with the Swedish WS being a smaller language WS, it would be much easier for you to make the change now than wait until you have 25,000 pages.
So now, at least at Swedish Wikisource experiments with similar templates have been started. That is an option, but adding a semantic tag resulting in the need of templates seems a bit awkward to me.
Could you explain what you mean by this statement? I don't quite understand. What semantic tag have we added that results in the need of a template?
Z
2006/7/25, Ryan Dabler zhaladshar@gmail.com:
So now, at least at Swedish Wikisource experiments with similar templates
have been started. That is an option, but adding a semantic tag resulting in the need of templates seems a bit awkward to me.
Could you explain what you mean by this statement? I don't quite understand. What semantic tag have we added that results in the need of a template?
Oh, the <poem> tag of course! Before that all the poems (at least at our little wiki) were formated with manual indentions, like
: First line of the poem : Second line of the poem : Third line of the poem : : First line of the second stanza : Second line of the second stanza : Third line of the second stanza
It solved two problems at one go: the format of the poem, and the distinction between intro text and poem. The poem tag takes care of the first one of these, but not the second and so, we need another solution for that.
/habj
habj wrote:
What is the solution here, for the wikis that do not already have these elaborate templates? One could do some wiki-specific adaptation to the poem tag, so that it adds blank spaces above the poem - that is however not so nifty when there actually is no "intro". Should we ask to get another semantic tag for the intro? Or is templates, like at English Wikisource, the major solution?
To my eyes, the simplest thing is to adjust the style for the <poem> tag to make it more distinct. The default doesn't enforce any special appearance, but in most cases people probably would want them.
For instance, in MediaWiki:Common.css one could add:
.poem { margin-left: 1in; }
which will indent all <poem> sections. Borders, backgrounds, font styles etc could also be used here. Even just indentation should be plenty to set off poem text from surrounding intro text pretty well.
It's also possible to use templates or something to make a special introduction style, but IMHO that's probably not necessary.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
Brion Vibber suggested in his extension
For instance, in MediaWiki:Common.css one could add: .poem { margin-left: 1in; }
I tried this in cs.source and it works excellent (I did 2.5em)
-jkb-
----- Original Message ----- From: "Brion Vibber" brion@pobox.com To: "Wikimedia developers" wikitech-l@wikimedia.org Cc: wikisource-l@wikimedia.org Sent: Tuesday, July 25, 2006 4:05 AM Subject: Re: [Wikisource-l] [Wikitech-l] Wikisource poem extension - but theintro text?
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2006/7/25, Brion Vibber brion@pobox.com:
To my eyes, the simplest thing is to adjust the style for the <poem> tag to make it more distinct. The default doesn't enforce any special appearance, but in most cases people probably would want them.
For instance, in MediaWiki:Common.css one could add:
.poem { margin-left: 1in; }
which will indent all <poem> sections. Borders, backgrounds, font styles etc could also be used here. Even just indentation should be plenty to set off poem text from surrounding intro text pretty well.
Putting automatic indentation in the poem tag automatically takes care of the poem pages where no template for styling has been added so far, but does not destroy the possibility to add such styling templates later. So yeah, for a wiki that has not yet put styling templates on all the "intro" sections adding indention to the poem tag makes a lot of sense.
IMHO further formatting of the poem itself would not be desirable. The texts put on Wikisource are usually not formatted very much - not on svsource, at least. Making the poems look much different than the rest of the texts does not make sense to me. However, not only poems have such intros. Most of the texts do. Adding an "intro" tag would IMHO be the easy way to make sure these all get the same formatting, throughout the wiki - in a wiki that has not yet put templates in the majority of the pages, that is. (I am not at all sure that most of the users at svsource would agree with me here, though.)
/habj
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