- From: Martin J. Duerst <mduerst@ifi.unizh.ch>
- Date: Wed, 11 Dec 1996 16:45:55 +0100 (MET)
- To: Larry Masinter <masinter@parc.xerox.com>
- cc: avine@dakota-76.eng.sun.com, rosenne@NetVision.net.il, www-international@w3.org
On Wed, 11 Dec 1996, Larry Masinter wrote: > Andrea: > > # I, on the other hand, would, because I have a limited knowledge of > # Japanese characters/ideographs/logographs, but a much more extensive > # knowledge of spoken Japanese. This is not unusual amongst > # Japanese-as-2nd-language speakers. > > Another user: > > > My favorite color is blue. I would prefer to have web pages with blue > > backgrounds and white text rather than red and green. Red really makes > > me angry! > > Just because users have some preference doesn't mean that putting the > preference into the user agent request string is useful. I definitely agree. In contrast to the Latin/Cyrillic issue for Serbian/Kroatian, where automated conversion on the client side is the solution, conversion to Latin letters (called Romaji in the case of Japanese) can not be automated, neither at the server nor at the client. So you would have to convince content providers that they produce both Kanji and Romaji versions of their texts. Unless they have Romaji (or Kana only) versions for other audiences, such as blind people, this will be too expensive. A middle solution could be the addition of Ruby (Furigana) to some texts, esp. in those cases where the pronounciation is difficult to guess, or for educational texts. There is acutally a proposal for Ruby markup in HTML, it is an internet draft: draft-duerst-ruby-00.txt available from your favorite internet draft directory, or as: ftp://ftp.ifi.unizh.ch/pub/multilingual/draft-duerst-ruby-00.txt If you have any comments about it, please send them to me. Regards, Martin.
Received on Wednesday, 11 December 1996 10:54:51 UTC