[whatwg] My case for Ruby-elements

[Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis]

Krzysztof Żelechowski wrote:
> 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 provide historical documents in an interlinear fashion: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. 

How would such a document be read linearly? Swapping between the two 
languages? If so, you could use a structure like:

<div class="passage">
<p lang="en">Hello</p>
<p lang="fr">Salut</p>
</div>

And style that with display:table-row and display:table-cell.

This might also be an interesting use-case for the ALT element suggested 
on the public-html list:

<div class="passage">
<p id="p4858" lang="en">Hello</p>
<alt for="p4858 lang="fr"><p>Salut</p></alt>
</div>

--
Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis

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
>