[whatwg] Ruby markup - Furigana Re: Presentational safety valves

[fantasai]

Henri Sivonen wrote:
> On Jan 4, 2007, at 12:05, Karl Dubost wrote:
> 
>> Le 4 janv. 2007 à 18:41, Henri Sivonen a écrit :
>>> It doesn't matter much. It is rather clear that the ruby markup is 
>>> intended for a particular Chinese and Japanese typographical device. 
>>> You'd use the markup whenever you want to use that typographical 
>>> device. Bothering authors with what they profoundly mean when they 
>>> use the typographical device isn't particularly helpful.
>>
>> Furigana is an annotation system.
>> And essential for learning the language at school.
>> Or read the kanjis that are too difficult to be known when browsing.
> 
> Right, but my point is that authors will use the ruby markup when they 
> want the furigana typographic effect. It isn't helpful to insist on a 
> particular semantic scope like, for example, requiring the ruby base to 
> be considered "difficult kanji".

Right. I have even seen cases where ruby is used to annotate English words
(base) with Japanese Kanji (ruby):

   http://fantasai.inkedblade.net/style/discuss/directions/scans/genji2

Ruby is a nifty annotation system if you want to mark up words in parallel,
as for pronunciation, or word-by-word translation, or grammatical labelling,
etc. The key difference from other annotation systems is that it can be
word-for-word without being awkward. (Imagine doing this with footnotes.)

~fantasai