Ruby as vowel marking mechanism? (was Re: Implementing vowel marks)

aloha, adam & lisa!

wouldn't providing an expansion for non-rendered/non-printed/missing vowels
best be served by a system such as that provided by Ruby Annotation?

   Ruby background: http://www.w3.org/International/O-HTML-ruby
   Ruby PR draft: http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/PR-ruby-20010406/

i realize that in order to make a complete document truly accessible one
would have to provide annotation for every word containing a vowel--which,
in effect, mean that most, if not all of the content would have to be
glossed--rather
than discrete chunks of the text (which is how Ruby is used as a printing
convention for asian languages), but since Ruby is an emerging technology,
which stands a very good chance of being rather widely supported by a wide
range of user agents/web-content delivery devices--due, in no small part, to
the sheer numbers
of cybernauts and e-businesses who will directly benefit from its
implementation--its extention to
semetic languages (and any other language which is commonly/standardly
printed/written without explicit vowel markings), is worth investigating, i
think...

lisa, have you raised this issue with the internationalization and
localization folks?
   http://www.w3.org/International/
how about the Protocols & Formats WG?

personally, i'm surprised that this concern hasn't surfaced earlier, but i
couldn't find anything pertaining to hebrew or arabic vowel-expansion via a
cursory search of the internationalization activity's W3C web space, nor is
it mentioned in the I18N (i still don't understand that abbreviation)
activity statement, located at:
   http://www.w3.org/International/Activity.html

gregory.

Received on Thursday, 19 April 2001 21:24:50 UTC