Tim,
Any reason why you eschewed CSS?  One could wrap each line-segment in a
<div> and specify the indentations in style, using custom classes:

.in1 {
text-indent: 6em;
}

.in2 {
text-indent: 9em;
}

That would get rid of the phalanx of non-breaking spaces.

On a literary note: I'm not yet convinced that the indentations are
actually called for. They seem to be Pound's concession to the original
typesetters, given the narrowness of the page he could reasonably expect a
publisher to offer, a concession that he might not have made had the page
widths been more ample. Inasmuch as the HTML "page" is like an opened book
that has no binding crease, HTML offers twice the page-width, in a manner
of speaking. Under modern circumstances, Pound might like to see his lines
unbroken on the virtual page.

We took this subject up briefly a few months ago, and I'd like to hear more
from those who disagree with me on this.

Tim Romano


At 07:55 PM 9/23/01 -0700, Tim Bray wrote:
>I have a mouldy old website that I haven't maintained in years,
>but it has a scrapbook thingie that rolls interesting
>quotations and meta-quotations through once every week.  This
>week there's a piece of Canto CV featuring a fairly aggressive
>attempt to get the indentation right in HTML.  Go to
>http://www.textuality.com/ and hit the "Worth reading" link.
>  -Tim