RE: [CSS3 Ruby] i18n comment 4: Vertical layout not enough for bopomofo

Do you think there are other uses to which this may (or should) be put?
Bear in mind that for bopomofo you need to run the text vertically in
horizontal text as well as produce the tone placements.  It seems pretty
specialised to me.  

If we say 'right', I'm worried that a lot of people will think it has some
wider use than I think it really will have. I think most people would
confuse it with the 'inline' value in horizontal text, and the 'before'
value in vertical text.  

To my mind the cue to the implementation to perform the vertical arrangement
of letters in horizontal text and tone placement in vertical and horizontal
is really the distinguishing feature of this value.

You might call it 'right-vertical' to make more generic, but this is still
potentially confusing in vertical text, and I'm not sure what the use cases
would be, other than bopomofo.  Also, you'd probably have to address in the
box model what happens if people put large amounts of text in such a
ruby-text element.

Cheers,
RI

============
Richard Ishida
Internationalization Lead
W3C (World Wide Web Consortium)
 
http://www.w3.org/People/Ishida/
http://www.w3.org/International/
http://people.w3.org/rishida/blog/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ishida/
 
 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Paul Nelson (ATC) [mailto:paulnel@winse.microsoft.com] 
> Sent: 20 September 2007 22:15
> To: Richard Ishida; www-style@w3.org; public-i18n-core@w3.org
> Subject: RE: [CSS3 Ruby] i18n comment 4: Vertical layout not 
> enough for bopomofo
> 
> Labeling the right positioned ruby as 'bopomofo' seems to 
> indicate it would be used for no other script/language. I 
> believe we are better served by giving a clear definition of 
> placement, as in 'right' as in the current draft. That is 
> clearly understood by all for meaning and leaves an easy 
> opening for other scripts/languages to use the construct if necessary.
> 
> Paul
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Richard Ishida [mailto:ishida@w3.org]
> Sent: Friday, September 21, 2007 2:53 AM
> To: Paul Nelson (ATC); www-style@w3.org; public-i18n-core@w3.org
> Subject: RE: [CSS3 Ruby] i18n comment 4: Vertical layout not 
> enough for bopomofo
> 
> Yes, I think I agree that the implementation needs to do the 
> heavy lifting.
> 
> What I'm concerned about is that there should be a 
> ruby-position value that tells the implementation that it 
> needs to place the ruby text box to the side, and then do the 
> arrangement of letters and tones as needed.  This is a 
> clearly different case, and it cannot be applied by detecting 
> that the ruby text contains just bopomofo characters, since 
> people should have the right to choose where they want the 
> ruby displayed. It appears that that was the intention of the 
> 'right' value - though I'd be inclined to label it much more 
> clearly wrt what it is actually for, such as 'bopomofo'.
> 
> /me wondering whether we also need to change the section on 
> ruby box model to reflect this
> 
> I also wonder whether we should specify that a user agent 
> that doesn't support the right value should fall back to the 
> before position or inline position plus rp, since not all Uas 
> will support bopomofo immediately.
> If
> we don't, people still won't be able to use the bopomofo 
> ruby, because they can't predict that it will produce 
> anything sensible.
> 
> RI
>

Received on Friday, 21 September 2007 10:09:29 UTC