RE: [WSG] Newbie Questions: East-Asian Character Sets and Marking-up Poetry
Thanks for the link. Thankfully, this being Chinese poetry, indentation isn't a problem: Chinese poetry is frightfully regular, as in lines of precisely 4 characters (syllables) (with some abberations which may be attributed to its origins in folk poetry and song -- the syllables may have been sung swiftly to fit within one proper beat), 5 characters, and 7 characters; and no weird indentations like we encounter in English poetry. I haven't examined the entire corpus, so I may be missing some of the more esoteric forms, but that's my general observation of around 80 or so poems from varying periods. Certainly that's the types of poetry that I'm planning on writing about... I was more concerned with whether to use a blockquote, because this isn't my work: I'm quoting someone else's translations and the original is also not mine, they being written around 1400 years ago. I've decided, after some thought, that semantically a blockquote, to indicate that this is a quotation from The Book of Odes, or the 300 Tang Dynasty Poems, seems to work best. The dl version was just a bit of a thought, because it might allow me some flexibility if in the future I put up some examples of English poetry I like, but now I'm convinced that it isn't at all semantic. Also, how best to display the Chinese version without delivering odd garbage characters to people without Chinese fonts installed on their system. I'm leaning towards putting the pure English version on the blog entry, with a link to the Chinese version for those people who'd like to look at the original. Thanks again. Kwok Ting ** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help **
RE: [WSG] Newbie Questions: East-Asian Character Sets and Marking-up Poetry
Thanks, everyone. That's a start on figuring out what to do with this. I'll ruminate on it for a bit, do a few tests, maybe let a few of my readers test it out at a test page and then decide how to deploy it on the site. Kwok Ting Lee ** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help **
[WSG] Newbie Questions: East-Asian Character Sets and Marking-up Poetry
This is, I guess, one of the first times I've written anything here, but I've run into a bit of a dilemma and was hoping for some advice: 1. I have a number of analyses of poems I am planning on posting to my weblog over the next few months, however, I'm a bit stumped as to what mark-up would be most semantically correct (The poems are quoted from another source, so for the time being I was thinking of using a blockquote): A. blockquote h3Title of Poem/h3 p class=stanza Blah...blah..blah...br/ More blah.br/ /p /blockquote Or: B. dl class=poem dtTitle of Poem/dt ddBlah...blah..blach.../dd ddMore blah/dd ... /dl 2. Additionally, I am likely going to be posting entries that will be partly in Chinese (quotations from the original text together with my translations and comments, so that knowledgeable readers can refer to the original themselves to judge whether I've made any mistakes), and was planning on using UTF-8 encoding to encode my blog. Anyway, the question I have is (and this may be somewhat off-topic), but how would one go about hiding the Chinese characters for those people who do not have Chinese fonts enabled on their system? (To avoid those ugly squares or ? that show up when people who don't have Chinese fonts installed -- a not inconsiderable fraction of my readership -- access my site.) I've been thinking of two ways: A. A cookie and a PHP script that would be set once (manually) to opt-in for the Chinese fonts (presumably anyone who does that will have the fonts installed on their system). B. Storing the Chinese text (poems and prose excerpts) in a separate file and linking to it from the translated version. Thanks in advance for any advice... Kwok-Ting Lee ** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help **
RE: [WSG] Validation error question for XHTML Strict
input has to be wrapped in a block level tag of some sort, e.g. p, div, fieldset etc. So you'd use: pinput/p or divinput/div or fieldsetinput/fieldset (very simplified) Kwok-Ting ** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help **
