Re: For review: What is ruby?

Hello Richard,

Thanks for working so hard on updating all these various outreach materials.

For the "What is ruby?" document, I think the thing most in need of a 
change is the question. Rather than the unnatural "What is 'ruby 
annotation'?", what about a more natural
"What are 'ruby' annotations?" ?

It might also be good to have a very small "i" notice explaining why 
"rubies" is avoided.

The 'intended audience' could also be improved. It says: "anyone who has 
heard of ruby text and would like to know a little more about it." but 
the article is perfectly readable for people who haven't heard about 
ruby yet. And it should avoid the term 'ruby text' because that's used 
as a specific term later.

Instead of "obscure characters, or characters that the reader is not 
expected to be familiar with", which to me reads as almost the same 
thing twice, you use "obscure characters, or characters that have 
multiple readings". The later is quite often the case in Japan, not only 
but first and foremost with names.

"On the rare occasions that it is used to express semantic information, 
Japanese ruby typically appears below horizontal text, and to the left 
of vertical text.": I'm not an expert, but I seem to remember these 
being on the same side, as long as that side isn't already used for 
pronunciation.

"possible to mix both phonetic and semantic ruby": I'd change 'mix' to 
'combine', because no real mixing is taking place. It may also be better 
to use a simple example (one-side pronunciation ruby) first, before an 
example with two-sided ruby, to avoid the impression that the later is 
the norm.

For bopomofo, it would be great to have the vertical example also, to 
make the text even easier to understand.

For mono/group/jukugo ruby, pointers directly to the relevant parts of 
the Japanese Layout document would probably help.

Regards,    Martin.

On 2016/02/05 01:20, ishida@w3.org wrote:
> This is a request for wide review of
> http://w3c.github.io/i18n-drafts/articles/ruby/index.en
>
> Since it is a small document, please raise any comments by next
> *Wednesday, 10th Feb.* Once any comments are dealt with, i will publish.
>
> Please raise comments as issues on github *by using the "Leave a
> comment" link* at the bottom of the page (which will automatically add
> some useful information to your comment).
>
>
>
>
> Background:
>
> This article will replace
> https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-ruby
> which is out of date.
>
> I am also in the process of writing two additional articles, Ruby
> Markup, and Ruby Styling, which will address how to produce ruby in HTML
> and CSS. They will be scheduled for review at a later date.
>
>
>
> thanks,
> ri
>
> .
>

Received on Tuesday, 9 February 2016 05:27:13 UTC