FW: Ruby and collation in DITA

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JoAnn T. Hackos, PhD
President
Comtech Services, Inc.
710 Kipling Street, Suite 400
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-----Original Message-----
From: Felix Sasaki [mailto:] 
Sent: Tuesday, August 28, 2007 5:35 PM
To: 
Cc: Richard Ishida; JoAnn Hackos; Yves Savourel
Subject: Re: Ruby and collation in DITA

Hi Deborah again,

we are currently discussing in the ITS WG a best practice for XML Internationalization about ruby, see http://www.w3.org/International/its/techniques/its-techniques.html#DevRuby
It would be great to get your input on this.

Thank you very much in advance,

Felix

 wrote:
>
> Hi Richard, Felix,
>
> I know that the DITA Translation subcommittee has shelved ruby for the 
> moment (according to the 13 August 2007 minutes), so this is largely 
> moot until it becomes unshelved . . . but as a kind of parting shot, I 
> wanted to say that you have convinced me of the need to keep <rp> in 
> DITA.
>
> In response to the W3C recommendation's remark:
> > > "Some user agents might not understand ruby markup, or may not be 
> > > able to render ruby text appropriately."
> I said:
> > > There are no DITA user
> > > agents that won't understand ruby markup.
>
> On further reflection, I'm wrong. There *is* a DITA user agent that 
> doesn't understand ruby: a topic that does not include the ruby 
> domain, but wants to conref a phrase from a topic that understands ruby.
>
> <!-- phrases.xml -->
> <topic id="ja_phrases" xml:lang="ja" domains="(topic ruby)" > ...
> <ruby id="kyoto"><rb>$B5~ET(J</rb><rp>(</rp><rt>$B$-$g$&$H(J</rt><rp>)</rp>
> </ruby>
> ...
> </topic>
>
> <!-- Assuming that <ruby> specializes from <ph> --> <topic id="puller" 
> domains=""> ...
> <p xml:lang="ja">$B;d$O(J<ph conref="phrases.xml#ja_phrases/kyoto"/>$B$K9T$C(J
> $B$?!#(J</p>
> ...
> </topic>
>
> I'd expect that to resolve, after generalization-during-conref, as <p 
> xml:lang="ja">$B;d$O(J<ph><ph>$B5~ET(J</ph><ph>(< /ph><ph>$B$-$g$&$H(J</ph>
> <ph>)</ph></ph>$B$K9T$C$?!#(J </p>
> and display as $B;d$O5~ET(J($B$-$g$&$H(J)$B$K9T$C$?!#(J in the "puller" topic, as a passable 
> fallback for a topic that has no knowledge of ruby.
>
> Something to keep in mind whenever the need for ruby in DITA arises.
>
> --
> Deborah Pickett
> Information Architect, Moldflow Corporation, Melbourne 
> 
>
> "Richard Ishida" <> wrote on 19/07/2007 06:58:45 PM:
>
> > Hello Deborah, Felix,
> >
> > I haven't been able to follow this discussion in detail, but here
> are some
> > thoughts that I hope may help...
> >
> > > > there is a use case to add parenthesis if the processor does not 
> > > > understand ruby <rp> , see
> > > http://www.w3.org/TR/ruby/#fig1.7 as an example.
> > >
> > > That's certainly true of (X)HTML, which is what the TR says it is 
> > > for (right at the top in the abstract). But it's not true of DITA.
> > >
> > > The difference is in the opening sentence of section 1.2.2:
> > > "Some user agents might not understand ruby markup, or may not be 
> > > able to render ruby text appropriately."
> > >
> > > In the context of DITA, a "user agent" would be the transformation 
> > > stylesheets (which will recognize the ruby content and generate 
> > > correct XHTML or PDF or whatever), or an editing tool (which will 
> > > recognize the ruby content and present it to the author, perhaps 
> > > with appropriate CSS :before and :after generated text). There are 
> > > no DITA user agents that won't understand ruby markup. That fact 
> > > evaporates the need for <rp>.
> >
> > But
> >
> > [1] what if DITA marked up content is converted to, say, XHTML and
> displayed
> > by a user agent that doesn't support ruby: how would an author
> indicate what
> > type of fallback parens they wanted to use? For example, characters
> used for
> > Japanese rp are likely to be different from those used in UK. A DITA 
> > processor may not need to use rp, but I think it would make for more 
> > interoperable *content* to allow it in the markup.
> >
> > [2] note that someone may actually want to display the ruby inline 
> > as a conscious presentational choice in certain contexts - see for
> example the
> > CSS Ruby Module that has an 'inline' value[1] for the 'display'
> property.
> > In that case, too, the author should be able to specify the 
> > preferred characters in rp elements.
> >
> > I guess what I'm saying is, authors can ignore rp if they feel DITA 
> > processors are the only things that will see their content, but it
> would be
> > better to allow for the full content model because (a) we can't 
> > always forsee how the content will be used, and (b) it won't harm 
> > the DITA processor.
> >
> > RI
> >
> >
> > [1] http://www.w3.org/TR/2002/WD-css3-ruby-20021024/#properties Note
> that
> > the descriptive section for this value is missing from the spec and
> needs to
> > be added.
> >
> >
> > ============
> > Richard Ishida
> > Internationalization Lead
> > W3C (World Wide Web Consortium)
> >
> > http://www.w3.org/People/Ishida/
> > http://www.w3.org/International/
> > http://people.w3.org/rishida/blog/
> > http://www.flickr.com/photos/ishida/
> >
> >
> >
> > > -----Original Message-----
> > > From:  
> > > [mailto:]
> > > Sent: 19 July 2007 03:23
> > > To: Felix Sasaki
> > > Cc: ; 
> > > Subject: Re: Ruby and collation in DITA
> > >
> >