For text, Curl web content often looks as follows:
{paragraph
Here is some text.
Here is some text to {italic emphasize} with a font-style.
And here is some {bold text} that is in bold font-weight.
}
There is a closing curly-brace for each element of the above declarative markup: for paragraph and for italic and for bold.
What is distinctive about Curl is that we can define our own markup elements such as poem and annotation:
{poem
}
{note 42, {it threnody} is mourning for one person, unlike {it elegy}. }
In the above case, {it } is likely declared as {italic } and {poem } as a special kind of paragraph formatting and {note } as a paragraph styled for annotation.
By a very simple change, I can suppress all notes (of course, this could be done in CSS for HTML.)
A Curl page is also a kind of software application and yet also a kind of structured text data: one Curl application can "consume" a Curl page as input. This opens many opportunities for web browsers specific to poetry annotation and translation and for ordinary desktop applications in the humanities.
Other computer languages have intended to be of use in the humanities: SNOBOL and Icon, are two important examples. What distinguishes Curl is that it can be used without "programming".
You may find that errors in Curl are much easier to track down than errors in HTML and CSS. I believe that you will certainly find Curl more user-friendly than JavaScript or Flash ActionScript or Adobe PDF.
If you have an international group requiring both UNICODE and research tools, you may want to look at Curl for your poetry portal on the web.
