RE: Ruby Annotation and XHTML 1.1 are W3C Proposed Recommendations

At 10:00 01/04/09 -0700, Carl W. Brown wrote:
>I am wondering how in the absence of a sub language how one should render
>Chinese ruby.  Mandarin ruby will not do a Cantonese reader much good.  Can
>I specify multiple ruby and then have one displayed depending on the spoken
>language?

Maybe that's one reason for ruby not beeing that much used in Chinese
as in Japanese? But it could be very interesting for somebody
speaking Cantonese and wanting to learn Mandarin, or vice versa.
You can give up to two ruby per base text, so you could have Mandarin
on one side and Cantonese on the other, or could switch on one
or the other with a stilesheet. For more advanced things, you would
need something like SMIL, which has an explicit <switch> statement.


>I have lamented the lack of a good IME interface to capture ruby as the text
>is entered.  If nothing else they can be useful for some types of sorting.

Yes, this is an interesting user requirement. But it's a matter of
editing tools, not something that can be done as part of e.g. the
(X)HTML specification.


>On a related subject:
>
>Has any further consideration been given to using style sheets to control
>the IME?  It is a pain to switch between fields that have different types of
>input.  For example if I am entering a URL that does not support Han and the
>a name field that does then a numeric field it is extra work for the typist
>to change the IME settings.

We have had various discussions about this, it's very clear that there
is a need. However, there are various quite different ways to address it,
and we haven't yet found one that satisfies enough requirements and covers
enough cases to be able to agree on it. But for XForms (see
http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/Forms/), we definitely need something like this.

I propose to move further discussion to the www-international@w3.org
mailing list.

Regards,   Martin.

Received on Tuesday, 10 April 2001 21:50:32 UTC