Re: [csswg-drafts] [css-ruby] visibility:collapse on ruby annotations (#5927)

Since an email I authored was cited, it's probably worth noting the use case:

I had a list of official song titles in English for many songs that had lyrics and titles in other languages, particularly Japanese. As ruby annotations, I provided the official song title in the native language of the song on a word for word and punctuation for punctuation basis. However, this would cause autohiding (i.e., text equivalency) problems because, for example:

* the Japanese script titles used fullwidth variants of characters such as the wave dash instead of the tilde and the fullwidth asterisk instead of the (regular) asterisk.
* the Japanese script titles were missing spacing around (e.g., mathematical) punctuation expected in English script.
* the Japanese script titles would need extra punctuation such as middle dots to separate transliterated names where English would instead use a space character.
* the Japanese script titles would need extra words such as the Japanese particle "の" to join adjectives to nouns in Japanese where English, again, uses space characters.
* the Japanese script titles would use different punctuation structures; for example, in the "Main Title: Subordinate Title" format of English versus "Main Title~Subordinate Title~" of Japanese. In this case, one would have a colon and space equivalent to a wave dash and nothing (i.e., an empty ruby base) equivalent to a wave dash.

Also keep in mind that these were _official_ titles being documented, so changing the punctuation to match in a way that worked better inter-language by, for example, omitting spaces in one of the matching titles wasn't acceptable.

Additionally, I later wrote a polyfill script that would auto-merge annotations (a feature currently missing from browser implementations), so simply omitting the punctuation from the annotations was out of the question since this punctuation would need to magically reappear when ruby bases and annotations were merged.

Obviously, this solution doesn't address all of these cases, though I can see how removing noise by hiding punctuation in annotations could be useful. For example, for the Japanese song title "＊～アスタリスク～", one might just want to use the English word "Asterisk" as an annotation without the punctuation while fully annotating the text as (*~Asterisk~) anyway to futureproof the code in case stylistic preferences change at a later date.

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Received on Tuesday, 16 February 2021 03:46:26 UTC