Prodigal Tim, Your HTML sins are forgiven. Go forth a new geek. ;-) To be fair, you did offer the disclaimer that the page was "muddy" -- I brought up CSS mainly because with CSS it is possible to have our cake and eat it too. If each line-segment were wrapped in a <div> or <span> tag, with a custom class identifying, among other things, the indentation-value of its column position, then it would be possible, merely by switching the style sheet, to display the lines broken or unbroken. I will put together a demo page in the near future; I'll have to bone up on the javascript required to switch CSS dynamically. As for the Eisenstein and Johnson analogies-- they don't hold, in that publishers DID have wider page formats -- but they were too expensive to "waste" on avant-garde poetry which was likely to be soon remaindered. I'm not saying that narrow columns are bad, and in fact I agree with you about the eye-strain caused by a long line, especially with small print. Pound suffered from such eye strain. (See Pound's letters to e.e. cummings, where this subject comes up in the context of page-design.) But the right font in the right size (both of which are adjustable by the HTML end-user) and the proper spacing between lines can mitigate that strain. Tim Romano At 09:06 PM 9/24/01 -0700, Tim Bray wrote: >At 05:55 PM 24/09/01 -0400, Tim Romano wrote: > >Any reason why you eschewed CSS? > >Oh dear, mea maxima culpa. I did it in 1997, that's why. >But for the benefit of the nonwebgeeks in the audience, Mr. >Romano is totally correct; this could be done much better, more >efficiently and more portably using CSS. Mind you, it wouldn't >work in Netscape 4.*, but this is an increasingly small price >to pay. > > >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. > >Well, er, yes. But Robert Johnson didn't have electric guitars >and Eisenstein didn't have digital special effects, and they >both did OK. And in my opinion the Cantos pages are on average >pretty darn nice looking... concessions to the medium at hand >have on balance typically not got in the way of an artist who's >on his game. > > > 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. > >Well, some of the best commercial typography and page design >on current offer - in both good magazines and good web sites - >make pretty heavy use of multiple narrow columns, because it's >a pleasant way to read. The eye seems more naturally to move >down than across. There are all sorts of quantitative studies >of this stuff for those who care. > >I wonder if any authorial/editorial choice went into the Cantos' >placement of breaks in lines that are apparently due only to the >page size? Some of them seem a bit too tuneful to be the result >of chance. On a related note, nobody thinks the use of "wd" for >"would" is done to save space. -Tim