Poetry means more XML so that new tech can break the lines

Related to the text mark up that we read about this week, I found this article: Transcendental Data: Toward a Cultural History and Aesthetics of the New Encoded Discourse from 2004 useful in conceptualizing just how fundamentally important metadata and mark up is for every piece of raw electronic data.

Not even a simple word is just what it appears on the surface, the layers supporting the output of that word are complex, including the mark up and software that is used to create and then view it. Every "bit" of information must be represented, for example, many of us have seen what happens to Microsoft Word "smart quotes" when transferred to html.

Both Microsoft Word and html are almost ubiquitous, and yet the two do not really communicate well. Proper standards of metadata and encoding should ensure that this communication disconnect is kept to a minimum. Liu writes in this article that even creation, or authorship, is fundamentally changed into a new experience by today's technology. But in addition, machines, the interpreters of this new medium, must know how to present data.

In the instance of a poem, XML, for example, can be used to code each aspect of that poem with a commonly (interoperable) understood mark-up, rather than exact procedural instructions. Procedural instructions are too specific, and fallible. They often do not extend to unforeseen circumstances. For example, giving the exact size in pixels of a word will not necessarily translate to a small screen like those on mobile devices.

This principle of scalable metadata (in this case XML mark-up) should be applied to any data sharing online project (or whatever we are calling them) that needs to be future-proof and robust.

That means less linear instructions like, "put this letter next to the left, make this 24 pixels"
and more breaking up of text or data into cross-platform recognizable objects like, "this is a line, this is a stanza, this is a capital letter, this is twice as big as whatever the normal size is"