Poetry Markup

[Nic Gibson <nicg@corbas.net>]

Hi folks

Has anyone actually used the poetry model in anger as it were? I've been doing some working mapping the Penguin model (I understand that the Penguin model was one of the inputs to DocBook Publishers' poetry model) to DocBook Publishers so I can render content. I've come across some things I don't quite understand.

I was wondering why the model is *quite* so open. I wrote the Penguin model based on the experience of marking up several hundred poems. Not once did I need to intersperse every line with arbitrary blocks or mediaobjects! Now, I don't really have a problem with the openness of the model per se. However, I don't see why the model needs to be so complex - poetry has a fairly restrictive content model in general.

There doesn't appear to be any way of representing any structure more complex than a simple verse structure either. For example, if I were marking up Dante I would want to be able to represent cantos and verses. I might also want a way to mark up couplets. All of these can be done with linegroups but they would need to be able to nest. I don't appear to be able to nest them with the current model (although I could nest poems). 

I was wondering if there was any discussion I could refer to so that I can understand the model. I don't see anything in the list archives but I may have missed something.

The main reason I'm looking at this is that I'm migrating my XSLT for the Penguin model to handle DocBook Publishers properly. At the moment, I don't see any sane way of rendering poetry without ignoring the majority of the content model.


nic
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Nic Gibson
Corbas Consulting
Digital Publishing Consultancy and Training
http://www.corbas.co.uk, +44 (0)7718 906817