Re: <ruby>, etc. in HTML5

Brian Smith wrote:
> Also, the example in the HTML 5 draft is bad. In particular, it is misleading because it suggests that <rt> elements should be interleaved within the characters of the words they are annotating. The proper markup is either:
> 
> <ruby>斎<rt><rp>(</rp>さい</rt><rp>)</rp></ruby>
> <ruby>藤<rt><rp>(</rp>とう</rt><rp>)</rp></ruby>
> <ruby>信<rt><rp>(</rp>のぶ</rt><rp>)</rp></ruby>
> <ruby>男<rt><rp>(</rp>お</rt><rp>)</rp></ruby>

This shouldn't be. Those letters form a name "斎藤信男" ("斎藤" is a 
family name and "信男" is a given name). Marking it up with such 
multiple <ruby>s breaks the name into meaningless letters.

It will look awfully in browsers which does not support <ruby> or when 
copying and pasting. I'm also afraid that screen readers or voice 
browsers cannot read it out properly.

> Or:
> 
> <ruby><rb>斎藤信男</rb><rp>(</rp><rt>さいとうのぶお</rt><rp>)</rp></ruby>

This is exactly what I recommend for this case :)

> Depending on whether you are treating the characters individually or as a word.

For typography, it would sometimes be better to treat the chars 
indivisually. But for Web content, we should treat them as a word rather 
than letter because we markup content, focusing on semantics.

However, with complex ruby, which groups characters to form base text, 
we can solve the problem. I wonder if we can bring such 
base-text-grouping mechanism into HTML5 (without having complexity in 
markup).


--
<ruby>
<rbc><rb> 矢倉 眞隆 </rb></rbc>
<rtc><rt> やくら まさたか </rt></rtc>
<rtc><rt> Masataka Yakura </rt></rtc>
</ruby>

<yakura-masataka@mitsue.co.jp>