Fwd: Selection on text with ruby

Richard told me that there may be people who would answer the questions in
this list, in addition to people in www-international list. Hence forward
this message here. Thanks.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Xidorn Quan <quanxunzhen@gmail.com>
Date: Sat, Feb 21, 2015 at 12:45 PM
Subject: Selection on text with ruby
To: www International <www-international@w3.org>, Koji Ishii <
kojiishi@gmail.com>, Shinyu Murakami <murakami@antenna.co.jp>


Hi,

We just implement CSS Ruby on Gecko, and we recently get a request from
users that when selecting a piece of text, the ruby annotations should be
excluded from the selection as well as the text in clipboard. [1]

AFAICS, it is a reasonable request. I don't think people generally wants to
select the annotations. In most cases, people just need the base text. But
I can see one case that, people may want to copy the whole markup structure
for using in other places.

Currently, in all browsers which support ruby, annotations will be selected
and copied as if they are inline elements. But in Kindle apps (for
iOS/Android), the annotations cannot be selected in any way.

I'm pretty sure that in common cases, people would only want to select the
base text. But what I'm not sure is, how often do people want to select the
annotation as well, and what would they expect when moving the text to
other places? I guess for plain text, they may expect that there are always
brackets around the annotations.

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1130891

- Xidorn