[whatwg] My case for Ruby-elements

[Křištof Želechovski]

You would read such a document in the following way: you choose a language
that suits you and read it in that language.  You only look at the other
column when you want to know what your contractor can see in the text of the
agreement.  The text is not interlaced but it is vertically synchronized in
order that you can know which passage in your language corresponds to which
passage in the other language.  HTML is unable to handle this situation
except in the simple case where the text has no internal structure and can
be split to passages that you can put in parallel as table data.
Chris

-----Original Message-----
From: Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis [mailto:bhawkeslewis at googlemail.com] 
Sent: Sunday, August 12, 2007 8:20 PM
To: Krzysztof Żelechowski
Cc: whatwg at lists.whatwg.org; WHAT WG List; Keryx Web
Subject: Re: [whatwg] My case for Ruby-elements

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 provide historical documents in an interlinear fashion: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
>