Re: HTML5 and ruby

Hello Leif,

You wrote (at the end of your mail):

 > The XHTML Ruby module thus allows spell checkers and screen readers to
 > perceive base word[s] without having to behave as if the<rt>  did not
 > exist. This seems like a feature from the XHTML RUby module that it
 > would be worth keeping.
 >
 > Comments?

I don't remember the Ruby Annotation spec to say anything about what's a 
word and what not. A sophisticated spell checker could deduce that WWW 
is one word in both cases, based on the fact that it's Latin letters and 
there are no spaces. A dumb spell checker would not treat it as a word 
because there's markup in between, again in both cases. On top of that, 
the main use case for Ruby is East Asian languages, where the concept of 
a word is somewhat unclear anyway because there are no spaces (except in 
modern Korean, but then there Hanja aren't very popular these days).

So I think this is an extremely marginal argument, if any.

I completely agree with Fantasai and many, many others that accepting 
<rb> for HTML5 would make things way more straightforward. It also makes 
significant existing content okay rather than invalid, and it's what the 
main user community (Japanese) wants.

Regards,    Martin.

On 2012/01/19 6:42, Leif Halvard Silli wrote:
> fantasai, Wed, 18 Jan 2012 08:30:47 -0800:
>> On 01/12/2012 07:53 AM, Richard Ishida wrote:
>
>> I think the inclusion of<rb>  allows solving all the use cases in
>> a consistent and extendable way, whereas the other options given
>> only solve some of the use cases in a haphazard way. For example,
>> you use<span>  for styling bases, double<rt>  if you have certain
>> kinds of double ruby, double<ruby>  if you have other kinds of
>> double ruby, and the fallback and inlining use cases remain
>> unsolved. I don't see any reasonable objections to using<rb>, so
>> I don't understand why HTML needs to go to such great lengths to
>> avoid using it.
>
> +1 But I wonder if you have an opinion on the following: HTML5 allows
> us to split up a base word, making difficult to perceive as we a word.
> For example, to mark up 'WWW' as follows would prevent e.g. a spell
> checker from perceiving the acronym 'WWW':
>
> <ruby>
>    <rb>W</rb><rt>World</rt>
>    <rb>W</rb><rt>Wide</rt>
>    <rb>W</rb><rt>Web</rt>
> </ruby>
>
> Whereas in the XHTML Ruby module, then one would have had to do this:
>
> <ruby>
>    <rbc><rb>W</rb><rb>W</rb><rb>W</rb></rbc>
>    <rtc><rt>World</rt><rt>Wide</rt><rt>Web</rt></rtc>
> </ruby>
>
> Or, of course, one could do this:
>
> <ruby>
>    <rb>WWW</rb>
>    <rt>World Wide Web</rt>
> </ruby>
>

Received on Thursday, 19 January 2012 01:51:29 UTC