Proposed text for rb bug

How about this?  Please send comments by return - i'd like to publish 
tomorrow if possible.

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Here's a (rather belated) summary of what came out of the discussion 
between the i18n WG and Ian at TPAC.

Ian had not realised that we wanted rb to be only an optional tag. This 
initially made some difference to his amenability to consider it's use. 
We, on the other hand, realised that we hadn't properly thought through 
whether you could achieve ruby styling using span (which will be allowed 
inside ruby in html5).

We discussed the legacy question, but found it hard to argue for rb 
solely on that ground, since other things have been discontinued in 
html, and certainly we agreed that the html5 model is easier to use, in 
general, than the old model (because it reduces the markup overhead for 
the content author).  The question is whether we need rb for particular 
use cases.

Ian was open to hear technical arguments for retaining rb. Much of the 
discussion at that time centred around the possible need for rb to 
support complex ruby. We reviewed the use cases for complex ruby with 
Ian, but we believe that we don't yet have a clear answer as to whether 
rb is required in order to achieve the goals of complex ruby (ie. ruby 
on both sides, and association of rt with rb). We agreed that we needed 
to investigate that (which will entail better understanding how we could 
achieve the effects of complex ruby in html5) and the pros and cons of 
using span, and put our findings to Ian. (see comment 59).

Since then we have realised that there may be some other use cases, such 
as replacement of ruby base text with ruby text, or aggregation of ruby 
texts within parens for jukugo ruby, that we overlooked in our discussion.

Note that the WG, during our discussion, didn't come to Ian's conclusion 
in comment 67 that "<rb> was in fact not only unnecessary, but 
potentially harmful", but we did feel that we needed to do further 
research into the pros and cons for the use of rb. As Ian also says in 
comment 67, "Richard took an action item to discuss this further with 
other members of the working group and report back". We have begun this 
process, and are hoping to continue along that route without having to 
resort to the adversarial jousting competition that escalation often 
entails.

To that end, we would like to consolidate the various technical 
arguments put forward for rb, ensure that they are investigated more 
thoroughly where needed, and more clearly draw out the pros and cons for 
its use.

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RI


-- 
Richard Ishida
Internationalization Activity Lead
W3C (World Wide Web Consortium)

http://www.w3.org/International/
http://rishida.net/

Received on Monday, 5 December 2011 18:03:37 UTC