Christophe Strobbe wrote:

> Line numbering does make sense for poetry, even in poems where 
> whitespace matters. It is common practice in literature textbooks. Any 
> academic edition of plays by Shakespeare (and near-cotemporaries) also 
> uses line numbering. However, in such textbooks and editions, only 
> every fifth or tenth line gets a number.
> Moreover, when quoting a literary text, you woulnd't use blockcode but 
> blockquote. For poems where whitespace matters, I find blockquote 
> (with CSS white-space:pre) preferable to the pre element.

Who says that it must be a quote? Are you saying I canâ??t make original 
poems myself?

Anyways, I wouldnâ??t want line numbering for poems, but I would want it 
for code. So that is a case where I want to distinguish code from other 
preformatted content, which is what I meant to illustrate.

As another example, consider ASCII art. It is definitely preformatted. 
It definitely isnâ??t code, and definitely shouldnâ??t have numbered lines. 
(And Iâ??d say the chance of encountering both code blocks and ASCII art 
on the same website is much higher too ;).)


~Grauw

-- 
Ushiko-san! Kimi wa doushite, Ushiko-san!!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Laurens Holst, student, university of Utrecht, the Netherlands.
Website: www.grauw.nl. Backbase employee; www.backbase.com.