[WEB4LIB] Re: hanging indents?

[Lee Jaffe]

I think that this response cuts the heart of the question, that there isn't
a set of bibliographic tags incorporated into the HTML standards.  Since
I've been creating bibliographes on the web for a long time, this has been
a constant challenge. I'd love it if the next iteration of the HTML standards
included tags for bibliography with the appropriate formating.  e.g.,

	<bl>
	<ba>Swift, Jonathan</ba>
	<bt>Gulliver's Travels.</bt>
	<bl>London :</bl>
	<bp>Motte</bp>,
	<bd>1716</bd>
`	<bc>2 v.</bc>
	</bl>

Until then, the choice seems to between adopting an existing formatting
tool which most closely approximates the bibliographic form or doing
elaborate physical layouts to approximate the look of a bibliography.  Since
my reading of HTML has always been that markup is meant to describe
content first and appearance second, I've believed that adopting tags near
in meaning was the better approach.  It doesn't take a far stretch to give
the main entry of a bibliographic citation the <dt> position and put 
the following
information within <dd> tags.

On the other hand, it seems to me that twisting text around with elaborate
but meaningless formatting tricks is very much outside of the spirit of the
HTML standards.

Frankly, if you want a good looking page and you don't really care how you
accomplish it, you can always do the bibliography as a .txt file or lay it out
with <pre> tags within an HTML file.  Or if you're really desparate, 
PDF (shudder).

-- Lee Jaffe, UC Santa Cruz

At 6:26 AM -0800 3/16/01, Peter C. Gorman wrote:
>At 5:25 PM -0800 3/15/01, Lee Jaffe wrote:
>>>   Is there any way to create a hanging indent on a web page?
>>
>>Am I missing something or doesn't  <dl><dt><dd> answer this need?
>
>Only if you're actually creating a definition list, in which case 
>browsers' default rendering may do this. But, to quote from the Web 
>Content Accessibility Guidelines, 3.1:
>
>"Using markup improperly -- not according to specification -- 
>hinders accessibility. Misusing markup for a presentation effect 
>(e.g., using a table for layout or a header to change the font size) 
>makes it difficult for users with specialized software to understand 
>the organization of the page or to navigate through it."
>
>If it's just the formatting effect you're after, CSS is really the 
>only way to go. The combination of negative indent and postive left 
>margin mentioned in a previous post works quite well, even in 
>Netscape:
>
>p.list { margin-left: +1.75em;
>          text-indent: -1.75em  }
>
>--
>_______________________________
>Peter C. Gorman
>Senior Technology Librarian
>University of Wisconsin-Madison
>Library Technology Group
>pgorman at library.wisc.edu
>(608) 265-5291
>
>What's the difference between fiddle players and government bonds?
>Government bonds eventually mature and earn money.