[whatwg] My case for Ruby-elements

[Krzysztof Żelechowski]

Dnia niedziela, 12 sierpnia 2007 14:20, Keryx Web napisał:
> Today, in a private mail Simon Pieters said that HTML 5 will probably
> get the ruby-elements as well.
>
> I had intended to write about this to this list and now simply will ask
> if this is the case?
>
> Personally I have a special use-case. Being a theologian I would like to
> provide historical documents in an interlinear fashion:
>
>   Kai  ho   logos sarx  egeneto (Oh, yea, it should be in greek font....)
>   and  the  word  flesh became  (Literal translation)
>   2532 3588 3056  4561  1096    (Strongs numbers)
>
> Imagine this page
> http://www.studylight.org/isb/bible.cgi?query=joh+1:14&it=nas&ot=bhs&nt=na&
>sr=1 with proper semantic markup!
>
> Of course, we theologians are a small minority of mankind, but the
> CJK-languages will profit from ruby as well, right?
>
>
> Lars Gunther

I have just encountered a similar problem, the difference is my problem is 
vertical.  I have a document in two languages; the document has internal 
structure (not just plain text).  My intention is to display this document in 
two columns with corresponding passages side by side retaining existing 
markup.  I am afraid there is no way to do it because existing markup cannot 
span table rows.
BTW: What do you think about explicit kerning?  You can move boxes with a 
relative position around but the layout depends on their natural positions.  I 
understand this is rather off topic (CSS).
Example of application: 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tournament_(graph_theory)> (currently viewable 
with Internet Explorer only)
Best regards
Chris