End-User CSS Stylesheets for poetry pages

One case for a poetry browser or at least end-user stylesheets for CSS has to be the blood-red on black Rilke pages.

Most browsers will now let you specify a style sheet to try to ensure that text will be your chosen colour or font and the background neither blazing white or utterly black.

A poetry browser would provide a better set of links for a page than a simple bookmark and a more useful way of making notes or linking alternate translations.

Rilke has many translators and I favour one for this and another for that.  Then there is the question that underlies the issue that I raised yesterday: access to views of source texts, canonical editions, author corrections.

Bookmarks do not provide this and tools such as Microsoft OneNote, while helpful, are far from what I find useful.  A poem does need an outliner.  It needs an unobtrusive mode of presentation and then options - but perhaps not the "full morphic" of early Self and of the current Squeak Smalltalk 4.1 release.

For the Rilke page, I wish that this Chrome browser had a simple right-click to "sane view".  All right - "preferred view".  It is what we routinely get with astronomy charts: white on black or black on white.  To save battery power for text on my netbook I often opt for yellow text on a deep blue background. I never opt for a the default white background as I prefer something closer to "linen".

Many browsers allow a default to be set for the minimum font size to be permitted so that text remains readable for the user - for the reader of a poem.

My ideas for poetry browsers are usually tracked by my "aule" posts and pages for "aule browser" and "aule pages" as either aule-browser or eclectic-pencil.

My alternative poetry pages can be found at poets.aule-browser.com but will require the reliable MIT Curl plugin as I use the Curl language for the poetry markup.

One useful option is to be able to switch easily to an invisible HTML BODY element and a black or very dark background rather than using an annoying screensaver.  It's like closing a book on a real bookmark for a moment to reflect, to pause or to contemplate.  I think of it as the silence missing between tracks of separate compositions on audio media ... or radio broadcasts ... or before mandatory applause.

Will the web ever give us a programmable option for a blank screen for a few moments after obnoxious adverts?  Just the time to count to ten before they display red text on a black background ...

Question: last line should end with Schoß  or  Schooß  as both are on the web in text and in web images such as that at Google Books ?

Regardless, the Cohn translation falters at the end.  For feathers, see http://www.earthlife.net/birds/feathers.html with calamus, rachis, barb, barbules and filoplumes, remiges, retrices, inferior umbilicus.

I have tried

feeling, as he now felt, the root 

of each and every quill 

warming, reddening, in this flesh.

as you have to reject "every inch" and "quivering" out of hand.  I would like something of the cygnet fledging but have not arrived at it yet.