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.

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

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.

The poetry of Curl macros, or, poem markup for the web

Here is a snippet from an American poetry e-book on the web:

Stanza:

<div class="lg" ID="LG24">
<a name="L185"></a><div class="line" ID="L185">"In the name of all created,</div>
<a name="L186"></a><div class="line" ID="L186">Let us hear no more, my brothers;</div>
<a name="L187"></a><div class="line" ID="L187">Are we older than all others?</div>
<a name="L188"></a><div class="line" ID="L188">Are the planets in our way?"—</div>
<a name="L189"></a><div class="line" ID="L189">"Hark," said one; "I hear the River,</div>
<a name="L190"></a><div class="line" ID="L190">Calling always, night and day."—</div>
<a name="L191"></a><div class="line" ID="L191">"Forward, then! The lights are shining,"</div>
<a name="L192"></a><div class="line" ID="L192">Said the Watcher by the Way.</div>
</div>

and here is my Curl macros alternative markup:

{para
{ln L185, In the name of all created,}
{ln L186, Let us hear no more, my brothers;}
{ln L187, Are we older than all others?}
{ln L188, Are the planets in our way?"}
{ln L189, "Hark," said one; "I hear the River,}
{ln L190, Calling always, night and day."}
{ln L191, "Forward, then! The lights are shining,"}
{ln L192, Said the Watcher by the Way.}
}

even better:

{stanza 24 lines 185-192
In the name of all created,
Let us hear no more, my brothers;
Are we older than all others?
Are the planets in our way?"
"Hark," said one; "I hear the River,
Calling always, night and day."
"Forward, then! The lights are shining,"
Said the Watcher by the Way.
}

Now is the markup in the way of the content when you have to look over the output?

There ia an interest group devoted to Curl markup for the Semantic Web over at developers.curl.com - just register as a developer member to join.