Mercury markdown

I am quite taken with the Mercury .m files made available by Ralph ("Rafe") Becket at his cs.mu.oz.au page.

This seems to me to be much preferable to such things as pseudo-XML (markdown using no 'end' tags) as I remain taken with the style that I first knew in PDC Visual Prolog.

It doubtless comes down to a matter of taste.

For formatting poetry, everything depends on the context: is the page served from a remote site or is it local (the most 'local' being more content in a TiddlyWiki page, I suppose.)

My next task is to get back to Zope and Zope/Plone to assess the ease of text formatting there.

In passing: a very silly cross-library search at a University on 'Frankenthaler' could not split the art content from the cancer/physiology/medical content - not even by a range of Library of Congress identifiers.  So some are a long ways from the semweb no matter how wide their searches may reach.

Swiki localhost for AniAniWeb as a personal home page.

AniAniWeb strikes me as a natural evolution of WikiWikiWeb.

But as a personal homepage, the Squeak Smalltalkers seem not to have tested on a mere netbook which is not itself running an SMTP mail server.

The reason that I note this is that setting up this Wiki as a home page requires that you simply login as 'admin' with a password  of 'password'.  Create your wiki.  But now try to use that swiki (read: edit those pages!)

The packagers did not realize that to edit, you must login, but to login you must be a user and that you can only become a user through responding to an e-mail with an e-mail.  But this is localhost on a netbook.  Ahem.

It would all be easy if they had admin:password as the values for a default user in a default XML file.  And that is in fact the solution that I offer here: place a file named 1.xml in the users folder of the default folder.

It is charming to  observe that for starters almost any garbage sufficed, because the swiki will attempt to re-write the file.  If sufficed to find which file placed where would cause the swiki to fail. And browsing the Smalltalk code helped. This is usually not a sign of secure software!  Without going through the amusing details, here is what will suffice:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>

<user name="admin">

<settings>

<s name="password" type="text">password</s>

<s name="address" type="text">yourname@yourmail.com</s>

<s name="sendAlerts" type="boolean">false</s>

<s name="showModified" type="boolean">true</s>

</settings>

</user>

Note that mail alerts are turned off, so the required email can be bogus.

N.B. do not save the file with a BOM (on Windows set the file's encoding using an editor such as Notepad++)

Linux Curl

If you try the logiquewerks.com Curl pages from the aule-browser.com home page while on a linux desktop, here is a tip:

after you start, if a Curl Control Panel widget is cluttering your pane of active desktop applications, then right-click that Curl Control Panel 'button' and select an option to move it to some other workspace.  That will leave the Curl Control Panel over on the comparable pane of that alternate workspace.  

The Curl Runtime Engine (RTE) will still be running, but the widget will not be cluttering your pane of active window buttons on the parent window of your preferred or current workspace.

This sort of annoyance may be gone in Curl 8.0 (I hope.)  Even in Microsoft Windows, it should have been an option, not an imposed feature.  In some ways it makes telephone support of users easier, as in: "Do you see your Curl icon on your ..."

desktop clutter

One of the best features of a recent Firefox browser is the Prism plugin.

Prism can be used stand-alone to create icons on your desktop which are just a favourite web page.  That page opens almost as if it were an application.

The Firefox plugin for Prism adds a menu item to Firefox so that any useful page can be saved to your desktop as a Prism quasi-application.

But this has limitations.  Take Qtask.com for instance.

Back when I was doing UI's for Win32, I learned to set my Windows application default for backgrounds to non-white: I use a mossy-kind of olive drab.  This color shows up in the background of any application which neglects to offer a default background or a background choice.  The qtask.com web site is like that, so I use a user script in my Opera browser and a GreaseMonkey script in Firefox to flip that background to a pleasant "linen" color with

document.body.style.backgroundColor = "linen";

Easy.

When the web page is "sent" to the desktop, the user script option is lost: Prism's virtue is in being a minimalist browser - more a vassel or varlet than a butler or person-Friday.

But even if you could still run your own script to set a desktop web page to your own liking, the end result is not a home but a midden: desktop clutter and a hades of folders within folders.

This is what brings me to evolving Aule: the changes are to what is to count as my entry point, my aule, or your portal or her mashup.

Services purporting to offer home web pages seem to always fall short here: Yahoo's My Yahoo is one of the worst.

A bit of client-side persistent data is likely as not also not the answer: I want my "home page" to be available from my travelling netbook, my mobile and my sedentary PC.

So what would a browser of prospective entry points - aules - be like?

It would know how to preserve my preferred entry points and my privacy - as any private entry to a home should do.

My first set starts with the coming release from beta of Tcl 8.6 and TclOO for Tcl/Tk.  I have started by revising the link to a Tcl aule at logiquewerks.com.

Over the coming days and weeks the aules for Tcl, Ruby, remote astronomy, Fredericton, poets and such will offer a default HTML entry, a scripted entry and three Curl options - one being a browser widget on Windows IE, one a desktop app and one as a Curl applet in most any browser on most any platform.

There are a few Curl open-source projects that will facilitate building a web page that will help a user arrive at an entry point other than a browser "home page".  Some will want a 3-D aule with video and audio and some will want bread-crumbs that persist and some will want side-bars and gadgets.

In some ways this is also where IE 9 on Vista and Win7 is headed - but that is no help when I head out the door with my linux netbook or just my iTouch.

And in time it should lead to the demise of this blog as it, too, is in the wrong place and in the wrong format and does not show me what I need to know (a comment has arrived or a link has gone stale.)

My "home page" should be my entry point - simple, clear, visible and on my path.  And maybe more cluttered on a Saturday morning but elegant before midnight.  This is do-able.

Here You Have

The news reports that the "here you have" virus brought down servers at both NASA and Comcast should have IT managers looking at why employees have open access to web mail in their workplace web browser.

The aule-browser page on restricted email access begins at a logiquewerks.com page because open access to web mail is often also an open exit for confidential corporate content.

Given that Comcast's own customers run a variety of web browsers, there is no good reason for Comcast to use anything other than their own custom employees-only browser in-house.

Employees tasked with validating customer issues with generic web browsers on the open internet never need to perform those tasks while on the corporate intranet or to run on hardware or an OS which accepts user USB memory sticks as valid storage devices.  The helpdesk practice of using one PC for both internal tasks and external web validation involves a failure to invest in security.  In the early days of PC computing this was not the case in large corporations where 3270 terminals were still in use.  Having participated in the introduction of 3270 emulation with early departmental networking, I remember this situation very clearly.

Today an astute employee running Firefox or Opera as their corporate browser can use "user scripts" very effectively to mask his or her activity from the sight of any cubicle visitor so a casual management approach of "keeping an eye" on your staff will not suffice.

The shibboleth of "web-enabled" should never have meant the expensive choice of allowing free entry across "free" web browsers and "free" web mail.  That cost has been far too high for too long.

Fredericton, NB re-location in progress ...

We are slowly settling into Fredericton, New Brunswick after 15 years in the USA. Optical fibre to the door in not yet available here along the St John River so far west of downtown, so back to DSL with Bell Aliant after a few days wait (their tech arrived at our door in a t-shirt with no id: very helpful and very Canadian.)

With the release of ObjectIcon 2.4 and a new alpha of Rebol3 pending, there will be new features in the generation of custom Aule home pages and Aule site-specific browsers.

Python Aule updated as Curl Browser

Over at http://www.aule-browser.com/Python/ the custom Python browser has had an update.

Each component is generated from a list of features that could be declared in Curl (as it is now) or JSON or XML or other (Rebol, Icon, Logtalk, Oz.)

The buttons on the 'menubar' and the 'toolbar' now know how to set their roll-over tip and to update the status bar.  Much of the information is declared in typed enumerations and implemented as constructed procedures of type proc in Curl.

The browser requires the Curl Surge runtime and notes on that can be found at either www.logiquewerks.com or at www.curl.com or at the aule-browser.com home page.

As a dialect there is more to do: leverage macros and remove the distinction between action and browse which pre-dated the current approach.

A tagged set of URL's would now suffice to layout a basic custom browser or a desktop applet with a constrained set of navigable links.

Ovid Amores in literary markup using the Curl web-content language

I have refreshed the page at http://poems.aule-browser.com/ so that this simple formatting of  Tony Kline's translation of Book 1 of Ovid's Amores is utf-8.

The markup is basically

{line
   Just now, I was preparing to start with heavy fighting
}

as in

{poem
{elegy-id Book I Elegy I}
{elegy-title The Theme of Love}{br}
{br}
{line
   Just now, I was preparing to start with heavy fighting }
{br}
{line

although the breaks could be placed within the {line } text formatting procedure.

Running multiple Curl applets within a single HTML page

 

Over at http://aule-browser.com/multi-curl/index.htm I have placed an example of running more than one Curl applet within a single HTML page.

Each applet is an object element placed in one of two div elements within the main div of the page's body element. I might has easily have used the same applet twice if suitable input fields or controls were present.

One possible use if for the second applet to be used by a manager or auditor to make note on the use, content or features of some other applet within a single web page.

Astrophotography in Curl markup: M13 (NGC 6205)

Over at aule-browser.com/astro there is now a page for Hubble's terrific M13 image.

This use of Curl markup involves embedding the image in a wrapper frame to ensure that it remains centered in a black background within a silver window.

The image - a JPG - is loaded only after the page appears in the browser, but the code to do so is very simple.

The class used is ImageGraphic and the key property set to "true" is that for preserving the image aspect-ratio.

This first page is using a 600px X 600px image.  Smaller and larger options with a resizeable frame will follow.

This magnificent star cluster is overhead in the northern hemisphere well-before midnight at this time of year (the first weeks of June) and can be spotted with a small telescope or good binoculars sometime after Mars and Saturn have set in the west.  Look for Hercules overhead between great orange-red Arcturus (follow the handle of the dipper in an "arc to Arcturus") and the great bright blue-white Vega.  Arcturus will be a bit west of the azimuth (the sky directly overhead) and Vega a bit east.  The core of Hercules is said to look like a "keystone" - but I see a flower pot. M13 is found in the westerly long "side" of that asterism.

To see individual stars rather than a grey cloud you may have to "look off the fovea" - so don't look AT the fuzzy object, relax and just "see" into the dark near the nebula: suddenly you will be aware that the fuzzy thing is stars - but as soon as you look AT IT they vanish into fuzzy grey.  Steady now!  Try not to stare! Or get access to a 10, 12 or 14" SCT or other reflector telescope.

Remember: you are not after magnification, but optical resolution and more light!  Otherwise, there are always these magnificent Hubble astrographs.

Confidential Document Print Suppression in Curl applets

Over at developers.curl.com I have added a blog post on preventing the printing of material presented in a Curl applet.

One simple technique given in that example is to exploit the media attribute of the CSS style element.

I have a more elaborate working example of suppressing screen capture at LogiqueWerks.com where the user is mouse-and-keyboard constrained.

Dealing with actual camera capture of text material is another matter, but if the user hopes for quick transfer of a snapshot to PDF and then extraction with OCR, you can impede that by an overlay or a background.  In the case of Adobe, including marginal text in tiny font wrecks havoc with its text generation as does a zero margin with a visible border in a thickness near that of the letter "I" or "l".  An overlay with graphical lines is also somewhat effective in defeating OCR.

After that, anything eye-only is only as secure as the person viewing the material - in the presence of your lawyers and without cellphones, computing tablets and Q.

Poetry markup with Curl: {poem {stanza } {stanza } }

I have posted a note over at bytes.com on using the Curl web-content language for poetry markup.

Poem markup is very simple and elegant in Curl - and leaves you with a readable text.

Some of my examples are at poets.aule-browser.com

ActionScript3 TextField

Over at http://as3.aule-browser.com/ I have been looking at ActionScript3 in SWF as a web-content language for text.

Text cannot be handled as it is in a Curl declarative-style file, but there are alternatives such as JSON (which Curl also handles well.)

The first challenge was in alignment of text: if a TextFormat is applied across only a range of a piece of text, the Flash TextField alignment, margins and indents break in peculiar fashion.

Anything that will use word-wrap should be multi-line with a TextFormat that is set with no range supplied.

The first thing you may miss are the Curl units which are not pixels.

If you build a Flex application instead of Flash (I am using FlashDevelop) there are other components available such as VBox, HBox and TExtArea much as in Curl.

It is hard to find anything to rival the Curl "live-code documentation" in the Curl IDE, but in the end the glitches ironed-out wrinkle-free.

facing pages as responses: a Curl e-book alternative for Le Messager européen

In 1987 POL published a book in which the first chapter has many blank pages.

This is not due to illustrations, litigation or censorship: the text on the left-hand (even-numbered) pages from 16 through 70 (with the interesting exceptions of pages 15 and 72) are those of Heidegger as "interviewed" by Der Spiegel.

The right-hand pages (odd-numbered) 17 through 71 (and including 72), are the responses by Jan Patočka.

I will try to present this in a Curl format if I am able to obtain permission.

The book, Le Messager européen, is prefaced by Alain Finkielkraut.

My Curl e-book version would have alternative or even multiple responses - perhaps keyed to topics.

Pages which immediately suggest themselves for the right-pages are those of Hugo Ott or Victor Farias.

But there are also the pages of dissent: those of the Heideggerian faithful, the inspired, the devoted and the merely sympathetic.

Curl markup: marginal glosses for Galileo's Starry Messenger

Over at http://phil.aule-browser.com/ there is now a link to a Curl markup of Galileo's Starry Messenger (or Sidereal Messenger or Sidereus Nuncius) of 1610.

The onerous task was restoring the marginal glosses. When the text of a volume at Wellesley College was scanned into Google Books, the resulting PDF is quite readable but slow to load and includes a text by Kepler.  When text is extracted from the PDF, the result is a terrible mess due to the scanning of the marginalia.

The glosses are now restored using Curl markup with a custom definition of a text procedure {gloss } but they are not yet located in the margins next to the related text: they are in the margin immediately before the text.

Links to a few of the most significant glosses are at the top of the first page

The Curl runtime browser plugin (the Surge RTE) is required to view Galileo's text.  The illustrations will be restored at a later date.

Marginalia and Text: glosses, scholia and annotations

I was struck yesterday by a publisher's decision to place the chapter titles on each page of a hardcover book in the margins - running vertically.  While this permits both margins and a few more lines per page, it almost prevents marginal notes. Running lines along the margins are still fine.  Are they trying to impede handy scanning of books (marginal text plays havoc with rapid electronic scanning of text by-the-page.)

What has become less common is a summation of each paragraph or section in the margin (often in a smaller font) as scholia or glosses.  Somewhat comparable are the Table of Contents with glosses such as found in Art and Its Objects by Wollheim.

Enabling annotation in e-book readers with a virtual keyboard are one thing: being able to assign a text to students with selectable levels of annotation is another. For some ebook readers, text highlighting may suffice.

Moodle has realized the importance of notes/journaling and replaced its limited journal module with its blog module.

Philosophy texts in HTML versus Curl

Over at phil.aule-browser.com I have placed an exerpt from Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition side-by-side with an exerpt from Martin Heidegger's "Die Frage nach der Technik" which I find in the GA edition of Vortraege u. Aufsaetze.

This opposition is unsatisfactory is so very many respects: first, the lack of context. Secondly, the lack of immediate links to the contexts of the exerpts, not to mention translations.  And why this selection?  The parallel citations of Heisenberg are far more striking - suggesting to me that, although the volume is listed as in Arendt's personal library at the time of her death, she may have relied on the Heidegger citations.

Repeatedly, at critical junctures in essays by Arendt, I find turns of phrase which strike me immediately as both regrettable and Heideggerian.  Time and again her polemical tone is his - the same chord, if you will.

That he cites no one for his great insights in his quote has a frightful parallel in Arendt (compare Jaspers earliest letters to her as a student.)

Two related posts elsewhere are

• balderdash-in-arendt-human-condition
• hubris-and-nested-markup-for-text-in.html

More detailed presentations of philosophy text can be found at phil.aule-browser.com

Philosophy text in Curl markup

Over at aule-browser.com I have placed a German translation from 1909 of Henri Bergson's "Introduction à la Métaphysique" as "Einführung in die Metaphysik"

I will add a header page in HTML to select the viewing options for the text as Curl (http://www.curl.com/) markup.

Options should include pagination of translation, pagination of original, German italics, selected French equivalents and other links, comments and annotations as alternatives to the "plain text".

The same title was used by Heidegger in 1935 and the German version of the Bergson essay is interesting to compare and contrast to the pivotal Heidegger text.

I have not yet determined whether the German translation was in Heidegger's personal library.

I have tried to moot some of the issues related to markup over at http://eclectic-pencil.blogspot.com/2010/05/hubris-and-nested-markup-for-text-in.html

Curl International to merge with Sumisho (SCS)

A news item in Japanese at http://curlap.com/ reports that at their April 28, 2010 annual meeting, Sumisho Computer Systems Corporation (SCS) announced that Curl International their wholly owned subsidiary, would merge into SCS.

Curl Corporation and Curl International were formed in 2004 following the Sumisho acquisition of the MIT spin-off Curl.

While tech journalists have been noting the issues between Apple and Adobe over the use of Flash, there tends to be little mention in the press of Curl as an alternative to Flash + HTML + Javascript + CSS.

Curl was developed at MIT as a web content language and is now used almost exclusively by Japanese corporate clients of Sumisho. An exception is the widespread use of Curl by corporate clients of Paisley, now owned by Reuters.

In 2009, Curl Corporation in Cambridge MA had relocated from the square at MIT to few blocks away and then had down-sized further late in the year. Curl Corporation should be unaffected by the merger.

Curl 7.0 was the last release of the Curl environment; several open-source Curl projects are hosted at sourceforge.net and code.google. SCS's focus on corporate needs may help boost work on the Curl external library project which would help site-specific web browsers in wrapping Apple WebKit, for example.

As an alternative to HTML + Javascript + CSS, the notable requirement for Curl, like Flash, Air or Silverlight, is the Curl runtime environment - either for desktop or as a web browser plugin. Curl had not developed a server-side solution and had failed to protect their trademark (Curl is often confused with haxx.se cURL.)

In the USA the corporate office of SCS in New York.

Joel on Software and UNICODE and HTML charset

I wanted to post an note on the joelonsoftware.com page on UNICODE basics.

That page has a link to i18nguy.com which has useful pages linked.

My own habit is to use a variety of pages at fileformat.info such as the P-page and the S-page when I want a Pilcrow sign ( ¶ ) or the planet Saturn symbol or some such.

Some of my favourites are balanced quotation marks ( “ ” ) and a variety of foreign quotation marks ( »« ).

The reason for the quotation marks is so that when doing poetry markup in Curl I will not have to "escape" the keyboard dbl-quote character ( " ) which is used by the progamming language but which I don't want to use in text markup.

I seem to use the paired single-quotes ( ‘ ’ ) less often.

Here are German-style quotes: „Sein“ (will be better in a suitable font.)

Other favourites of mine are  § Ç ß ä ö ü à é and ê ë è ï î ö ô along with Ä Ö Ü.  The last characters should have been capital A O U with umlaut diacritics: if you see something else, you may have to change a browser VIEW setting for Encoding for your web browser.

If you are a Windows user who wants to copy and save these to a notepad cheatsheet, remember to save the file as UTF-8 on the SAVE AS menu.  When you need an  é  in a hurry, holding down the ALT-key and typing 1 3 0 on the keypad and then releasing the ALT-key will place U-00E9 into most text.

IF you are a Windows user with an editor that which will not use displauy UNICODE with the default Arial Unicode MS font, well, there is always Notepad++ ... and it will allow you to save the file with or without the initial BOM bytes that indicate the encoding (which default notepad will not suppress.)

The minimal HTML header follows:

<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
</head>

For more details, here is a char-encoding link.

Note:  the above links have been set to open in a tab or window other than this blog page.

Sophocles ANTIGONE in Curl web markup

At poets.aule-browser.com there is a first pass at marking-up Antigone.

This preliminary version uses fewer than 10 elements and could have been done with only five (5).

Subsequent versions will offer selectable translations, glossary, search, indexing and other features.

Curl as poetry markup: Friedrich Hölderlin

The first pages of Hölderin in Curl markup are now available at http://poets.aule-browser.com/

These poems are formatted very simply using {poem } and within that {stanza }.

Some poems have alternate presentations as two columns of verse using
    {table {row {cell verses} {cell verses} }}

Because of the ease of formatting, most of Hoelderlin should be available in Curl format within a few days.

Most have indexing in the page by verse - again using a simple text format procedure: each stanza only requires a line at the top with a {sec num} such as
    {sec 5}
    {stanza
         a verse here
    }

Very little Curl know-how is required, but the aim is to provide a visual tool to select and edit a layout.

The real strength comes when adding in annotations and linking to critical materials.  I will also being doing an MDI example with alternate translations of a poem in German, French, Spanish or Russian.

Heidegger and Cassirer

Over at phil.aule-browser.com/truth.htm I have a series of links to Curl versions of an eText: Heidegger's "On the Essence of Truth" in John Sallis' English translation (the Curl RTE browser plugin is required to view these pages as an eBook.)

A more interesting version might juxtapose the Heidegger of 1929-1945 with Ernst Cassirer.

It is clear from the Freiburg Inaugural lecture through the lectures of 1930 and 1932 which comprise the 1943 "The Essence of Truth" that Husserl is not the target.  Heidegger had effectively disposed of Jaspers of Heidelberg in his 1927 "Sein und Zeit" and may have imagined that he would dispose of Einstein in a second volume.  The remaining target was Cassirer in Hamburg.

Cassirer's 1923 first volume of his "Philosophy of Symbolic Forms" opens with the concept of "being".  That volume closes with what may be a clue to the Heidegger opus: "wisan".  What we have here is not just a Heidegger pun on "Wesen" but a clue to Heidegger's language and philological idiosyncracies: only in emerging in the opening that is the historic "facing" (in my interpretation, the Warrior out of concealment, onto the field of battle or the lover emerging from her dissimulations in clothing, manner, attitude) that in victory or defeat we become known as what we were (the destined great nation, the destined lover, geworfen, geschicht.)

Another clue is in the Cassirer quote from Plato's "Sophist" on "koinon ton genos" when placed in contrast to "koinon genos" in Section 6 of the Heidegger essay with its emphasis on sophistry.

That Husserl is simply side-stepped should be clear from the 1943 publication blithely ignoring the Landgrebe edition of "Erfahrung u. Urteil" in Heidegger's short-schrift of any distinction of Satz and Urteil and his outrageous justoposition of Satz/Logos and later stated equivalence of "Aussage" and "Urteil".

Heidegger pun's should never be ignored any more than those of the wittier farceur, Sartre (Cassirer was known for his wit and prodigious memory.)  When Heidegger choses to speak of "Umweg" in connection with his "Frage" we cannot ignore "Umfrage" and the more obvious "Abstimmung" and "Einstimmung".

Heidegger's erudtion in history of philosphy far outstripped that of Husserl and in the late 1920's and early 1930's he had listened to enough of Jaspers on his visits to Heidelberg to know where he stood.  But in his years in Marburg, Cassirer had still been the legend (when Heidegger became Rector of Freiburg, Cassirer was still Rector of the new Hamburg University.)  In terms of background in mathematics and science, Heidegger had only his brief exposure after he left dogmatic Catholicism (his later pronouncements on electromagnetic wave propagation on German television are trully laughable when you consider Cassirer's own books on science and specifically on relativity (on an equal footing with Russell and Reichenbach.)

Of course the critical confrontation with Cassirer comes later, at Davos, but tools for annotating philosphical texts could help to illuminate what would otherwise remain obscure.

David Frum on the iPad

I posted this note over at his "forum".
The eBook mobile device has a few challenges: one is the rejection of commercial formats by the free-software movement. The MIT web formatting language CURL (www.curl.com) was spun-off as a company and so got no traction: but it offers a great deal more than PDF. It is more than just text and imaging: we need options to comapre versions/editions/translations and options to interpolate footnotes or side-pane footnotes and to link to eTexts from footnotes and options for our marginalia, notes and annotations. Microsoft OneNote 2007 on a netbook is about the best thing at the moment.


A thinking person's eBook viewer is NOT a web browser. I ahve some notes on the topic over at aule-browser.com

Other formats include Djvu, Daisy, JBig2, MobiPocket, Plucker

EPub is basically just a ZIP file

The Curl format is a much richer alternative to HTML5 or the Literature Markup Language due to the availability of macros and user-defined formats.

Another long-shot: www.rebol.com or www.rebol.net with the arrival of Rebol3

The most neglected way to index and explore text: ICON as in arizona.edu/ICON or ObjectIcon at code.google.com (from the folks who brought SNOBOL to the humanities.)

Schwitters' Gesetztes Bildgedicht in a Japanese variant

Using the Curl browser plugin you can view this Japanese version of Kurt Schwitters' "Gesetztes Bildgedicht".

The selection of UNICODE Hiragana alternatives is my own.

Paul Valéry "Le Cimetière marin" (1920) as a simple Curl {pre } block

Over at the aule-browser site I have placed a simple example of a French poem (Paul Valéry "Le Cimetière marin") in a bare Curl {pre } block with a {paragraph } format on a Curl DefaultDocument page.

The Curl browser plugin is required to view the poem.

The Curl page itself contains the poem - it is not loaded as a selectable resource - and the page is locked in as UNICODE utf-8.

Copy via "copy-paste select" has not been disabled - which is problematic as the poem is in public domain in Canada but may be under copyright in the jurisdiction from which the page visitor is browsing.

As it stands, the poem is not presented so as to allow an "in-place" bilingual translation comparison stanza by stanza let alone a comparison of translations.  A look-up lexicon is also not available as part of the page - say, by dbl-click on a word or line.

As it stands, no "in-page" annotations have been enabled.

There is a more complete presentation of the poem in Curl markup at the HTML home page for poets.aule-browser.com where several poets are featured.

Kurt Schwitters' "Gesetztes Bildgedicht" in Curl

Over at the aule-browser site I have two Curl versions of Kurt Schwitters' 1922 visual poem.

The first is constructed of completely independent elements (excluding the enclosing frame) to facilitate an animated version.

The second is in slightly different Curl declarative style using the Curl border-spec option using instances of the BorderSpec class with each bordered internal frame.  In one instance this proved problematic and an apparently empty "frame" had to be given a right border to simulate a left border on the adjacent frame.

If you flip between the two as browser tabs you will see some minor layout variation which ideally would vanish by wrapping a contraint library (as with Alan Borning's original ThingLab.)

Other alternatives would include the use of a Curl grid or a Table or any of the above in a non-declarative or procedural style.

Poem annotations browser for International Day of Poetry: March 21

The usual thought is to take a generic browser and add a plugin so as to have a useful feature such as an annotation.  So you do that on your research PC.
Now you are sitting at the airport with your iPad.  Oops, that was a Firefox plugin and this is Safari (your annotation content wouldn't have been accessible to you on the web anyway ...)

If there is a poet who demands annotations it must be the author of these lines:

And then went down to the ship
Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea, and
We set up mast and sail on that swart ship,
Bore sheep aboard her, and our bodies also
Heavy with weeping, so winds from sternward
Bore us out onward with bellying canvas,
Circe's this craft, the trim-coifed goddess.
Then sat we amidships, wind jamming the tiller,
Thus with stretched sail, we went over sea till day's end.

These lines, thus far, could be in HTML as ASCII text (although the font was to be something other than Monotype Bembo - which even this is not.)

Oh - this is not from Derek Walcott's Omeros.

But the poet in question sometimes included Chinese characters  and classical Greek in his poems ...