Web content is written in HTML, which stands for hypertext markup language. Your browser (Internet Explorer, Safari, Firefox, Chrome, etc., including whatever the hell your mobile device uses) parses this to produce the text and images you see. HTML can be styled any number of ways, but a couple widespread conventions are friendly to poetry: paragraphs are almost universally separated by spaces, as stanzas are in poetry, and it’s unusual for the first line of a paragraph to be indented, though special code does exist to do that (more on that later). And poets who like to center their text or present it in fully justified rectangular blocks are in luck: those are things HTML does very easily.

Aside from that, though, HTML is not particularly poetry-friendly, and special measures are required to preserve a lot of the formatting which an earlier technology, the typewriter, made all too easy. Web developers have created some awesome, easy-to-use web publishing tools which are democratizing poetry publication and helping us reach new audiences in an unprecedented manner, but we poets and online magazine editors still struggle to figure out how to post anything more complicated than simple, left-justified stanzas with short lines. I’ve even seen some literary magazines that advise authors not to submit anything that can’t be easily formatted!

One problem is that many poets like to space text across the page in unconventional manners or indent lines in various ways, but HTML will not reproduce more than two consecutive spaces in a row without special coding. If online poets represented a numerically significant proportion of web content creators, there might be a blogging platform or content management system (CMS) just for us, with a poetry-attuned visual editor in which one could add intraline spaces merely by clicking an icon, in the same way one adds italics, links, underlines, etc. But in fact I can’t even find a WordPress plugin that does this, among all the thousands of plugins out there, which is especially galling considering that for its entire history, WordPress has used the slogan, “Code is Poetry.” I call bullshit on the self-styled code poets at WordPress.

A second problem concerns interline spaces, which different blogging and CMS systems approach in different ways. In most visual or WYSIWYG (“what you see is what you get”) editors, a hard return skips a line, so poets have to either compose in the code editor if they want single-spaced text, or paste their text in from a text editor on their computer. (Of course, if it’s a Word document, you have to first copy and paste into a text editor such as Notepad to remove all the extraneous bits of mystery-meat Microsoft code. Never paste directly from Word into the visual editor of a blog, CMS, or other website creation system! If you’re using WordPress, the visual editor includes a tool to paste from Word, which preserves universal code, such as that for italics and bold type, while stripping out all the B.S. code.)

A third and more intractable problem concerns the formatting of lines too long for the content space. Current versions of HTML make no distinction between prose and poetry, so all text wraps in the same way — there’s no out-of-the-box way to indent the continuation of a line as is customary for printed poems. In fact, lines don’t even exist as separate entities in HTML!
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Using Images

One solution favored by some web publishers is to turn difficult-to-format poems into JPEGs or other image files, and publish those instead of text. The problem is that this renders the poem invisible to search engines and to the visually impaired, who use devices called screen readers to access web content. You can get around the problem by putting the text of the poem into the image code using the alt attribution, but this is really only practical for short poems such as those included in haiga or poetry postcards — genres where presentation in image form is of course essential.

“Alt” stands for “alternate text,” the text that appears when the image either isn’t visible or hasn’t loaded yet (still a common situation for many people in rural locations with slow, dial-up connections). It’s not to be confused with the mouseover text, which can be identical but has to be included separately using the title attribute. For optimal usability, include a descriptive term such as “poem” or “poetry postcard” in the alt text. Here’s an example from my “Postcards from a Conquistador” series, for a poem called “Misfit“:

<img src="http://www.vianegativa.us/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/postcard-from-a-conquistador-9.jpg" border="1" alt="Poem: I was the village misfit, the one who refused to stop dreaming. I could be an entrepreneur, they said, accountable only to the crown. Those who brought daggers were given swords. Those who brought nothing were stripped and beaten." />

Since this article is about publishing to the web, I won’t get into other formats that can be shared on the web, such as PDFs and the new ebook/ezine platforms that build upon them. But from time to time I see online poetry magazines sharing all their textual content via images, and I have to wonder why the heck they aren’t just using Issuu or Scribd.
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