I've been struggling with the problem of laying out medieval poetry in HTML using just CSS. The problem is with line numbers, which usually appear to the left (sometimes to the right) of the poem; yet the left margin of the poem should remain even, and lines should wrap nicely, with extra space on the left after a wrap.
Much, perhaps most of the poetry I've seen on the web is laid out with tables, which is a bad hack, and less than ideal in several different ways. For my online Old English anthology site I worked out a system which is just barely okay: but it tends to fall apart under stress--i.e. when a browser window is made too narrow. Since I've been trying to format poetry so it displays well on an iPhone or other small screen, this will not do.
Here's my solution, with a screenshot. It still seems less than ideal, and my question for anyone who has struggled to present medieval poetry well on screen, is whether you have a system that is better and are willing to share it here.
My current solution involves enclosing each line in a div with class "vl" (verse-line). *Numbered* lines, on the other hand, go in a div with class "vln" (numbered-verse-line). The <div class="vln"> lines start with a div containing the line number. So here:
<div class="vl"> hrēran mid hondum hrīmcealde sǣ, </div> <div class="vln"> <div>5</div> wadan wræclāstas. Wyrd bið ful ārǣd. </div>
Now the CSS:
div.vl {margin-left:6em; text-indent: -2em;} div.vln {margin-left:6em; text-indent: -6em;} div.vln div {float:left; width:4em; color:black;}
And that gives you something like the attached: good on an iPhone or a computer (Firefox, Safari, Opera, *probably* IE but I haven't tested there yet). I also have a variant for Old English hypermetric lines but won't bore you with that.
Things I don't like: having different classes for lines with and without line numbers; having the line-number div inside the line div (the alternatives I've tried tend to break *somewhere*). It would be nice if the line numbers somehow escaped being copied to the clipboard with the text, but that would surely be asking too much.
If anyone is interested in sharing solutions, I'd be very grateful!
Peter Baker
