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:
- 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.
- 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