Proposal: Domain for Japanese ruby markup ala HTML5

[Eliot Kimber <ekimber@reallysi.com>]

HTML5 provides an improved version of HTML 4's <ruby> markup, which is
required for Japanese-language documents that include kanji (ideographic)
characters. 

In Japanese, the pronunciation of ideographic characters cannot always (or
often) be known from context. The ideographic characters are annotated with
their phonetic transliteration, a "ruby", which is rendered above or beside
or following the ideographs. This is standard Japanese typography.

In the context of the DITA for Publishers vocabulary I have defined a direct
copy of the HTML5 markup design, e.g.:

<p> 探険船シビリアコフ号の北氷洋航海中に撮影されたエピソード映画の中に、一頭
の<ruby>
<rb>白熊</rb>
<rp>（</rp>
<rt>しろくま</rt>
<rp>）</rp>
</ruby>を射殺し、その子を生け捕る光景が記録されている。</p>

Implementing this for HTML output is trivial--just copy to output. For PDF
it's a little more work but can be done in XSL-FO.

<ruby> and its ruby-specific subelements are specializations of <ph>.

I am proposing this as a new domain simply to keep the vocabulary isolated
so that non-Japanese-language documents need not include this markup. But it
would equally appropriate to add it to the DITA base vocabulary as well.

The Ruby markup works as expected in most modern browsers and in at least
iBooks for EPUB. I have not tested on Kindle Fire.

The HTML5 specification for <ruby> is here:

http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.html#the-ruby-element

The D4P vocabulary module and HTML implementation for the Open Toolkit is
available as part of the DITA for Publishers package,
dita4publishers.sourceforge.net.

Cheers,

Eliot 

-- 
Eliot Kimber
Senior Solutions Architect
"Bringing Strategy, Content, and Technology Together"
Main: 512.554.9368
www.reallysi.com
www.rsuitecms.com