Re: [emacs-wiki-discuss] RFC: verse tag markup and IE

[Vadim Nasardinov]

On Wednesday 29 December 2004 02:25, Michael Olson wrote:
> In the emacs-wiki 2.66 release, one of the changes deals with verse
> tags.  The old behavior was to put a "br" tag at the end of each
> line, put that is not XHTML 1.1 compliant.

Personally, I'd rather not bother trying to be XHTML 1.1 compliant.

Although I haven't thought deeply about this, my cursory reading of

  http://hixie.ch/advocacy/xhtml
    http://www.google.com/search?q=http%3A%2F%2Fhixie.ch%2Fadvocacy%2Fxhtml


leads me to agree with the following statement:

    If you use XHTML, you should deliver it with the
    application/xhtml+xml MIME type. If you do not do so, you should
    use HTML4 instead of XHTML.  The alternative, using XHTML but
    delivering it as text/html, causes numerous problems that are
    outlined above.


But I would be interested to hear your comments on this.  The W3C
validator says (some of) your pages are valid XHTML:

  
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.mwolson.org%2Fweb%2FWelcomePage.html


However, you serve them as "text/html":

  |$ wget -S http://www.mwolson.org/web/WelcomePage.html
  |--10:24:21--  http://www.mwolson.org/web/WelcomePage.html
  |           => `WelcomePage.html'
  |Resolving www.mwolson.org... done.
  |Connecting to www.mwolson.org[63.246.10.45]:80... connected.
  |HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 
  | 1 HTTP/1.1 200 OK
  | 2 Date: Mon, 03 Jan 2005 15:26:04 GMT
  | 3 Server: Apache/1.3.33 (Debian GNU/Linux) mod_perl/1.29 mod_python/2.7.10 
Python/2.3.4 PHP/4.3.10-2
  | 4 Last-Modified: Mon, 03 Jan 2005 05:42:54 GMT
  | 5 ETag: "35c3b5-30c4-41d8db5e"
  | 6 Accept-Ranges: bytes
  | 7 Content-Length: 12484
  | 8 Keep-Alive: timeout=15, max=100
  | 9 Connection: Keep-Alive
  |10 Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
  |
  |100%[====================================>] 12,484       121.91K/s    ETA 
00:00
  |
  |10:24:21 (121.91 KB/s) - `WelcomePage.html' saved [12484/12484]



> I have opted to instead have the publisher include something like:
>
> p.verse {
>   line-height: 2em;
>   margin-left: 5%;
>   white-space: pre;
> }
>
> in their CSS stylesheet.  The problem with this is that Internet
> Explorer is unable to correctly break lines, even though that is part
> of the CSS 2 standard.
>
> I could use a "pre" tag inside the verse tag, but the "pre" tag
> usually has its own stylesheet entry which can conflict with the
> p.verse entry.

Why not something like

  pre.verse {
    line-height: 2em;
    margin-left: 5%;
    white-space: pre;
  }


> For a future release, I am trying to decide between two possible
> options.
>
>  1. Leave things the way they are and wait for Microsoft to make
>     their browser more standards compliant.

This is not going to change much though, is it?  There's still going
to be millions of users who continue to use whatever came
pre-installed on their Windows 95, 98, ME, NT, 2003, or XP box.

>  2. Include a configurable option to put the "br" tag at the end of
>     each line within verse tags, disabled by default.

That sounds like a totally useless knob, but that may be just me.