Re: [docbook-comment] internationalisation after 17 years

[Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com>]

[ Forwarding to the docbook@lists.oasis-open.org list because that's
  were actual technical discussion takes place. (Not your fault, Michiel.) ]

/ Michiel Kamermans <mkamerma@science.uva.nl> was heard to say:
| Docbook has been around for 17 years, and it's *still* not properly
| internationalised. I've been waiting for the DocBook 5 specification
| in the hopes it would follow the W3C ruby annotation used in CJK
| languages but useful outside this context too, only to see that as of
| the most recent v5 specification there is still no such thing
| available in DocBook, making it impossible to write textbooks in
| English about Chinese or Japanese, or write full texts in these
| languages for all audiences.

Thank you for this comment. I'm sorry that we weren't made aware of
this deficiency earlier. I consider proper internationalization a
critical requirement for DocBook markup.

| Can the ruby specification (http://www.w3.org/TR/ruby/) *please* be
| just copied verbatim out of the w3c ruby annotation specification and
| added to docbook, with 'text' as parent of the ruby element, and as
| child of the rp, rb, and rt elements. Given that this has become used
| quite a bit on the internet as well means there is clear typographical
| styling avilable for it to, so that the docbook stylesheets can be
| extended for it too.

The Relax NG token "text" is for literal character data, it's not
appropriate as a "parent". I assume that you mean <ruby> should be
available ubiquitously, anywhere that "text" can appear, is that
right?

Is it always sufficient to have only text inside the rp, rb, and rt
elements? How should <ruby> interact with other inline elements?

| Please, I just want to be able to write my textbooks without having to
| resort to modifying docbook and have it be rejected by docbook editors
| because the supposed standard is lacking a feature that a significant
| part of the publishing world needs.
|
| so an official request:
| please add 'ruby' annotatio to docbook 5 as soon as possible, as the
| current 'annotation' element is perfectly useless for this purpose.

It was absolutely not intended for this purpose.

| tomorrow would be nice, v5.0.1 would be acceptable, v5.1 would be too
| far in the future - docbook's been apparently actively kept away from
| use with languages such as Japanese for 17 years by now, why on earth
| is this allowed to persist.

Because no one ever told us that the problem existed. (Or, perhaps, we
were told and failed to understand, I'm not suggesting anyone is to
blame, simply that it was not a requirement we were aware existed.)

In my opinion, this comment must be addressed immediately and I will
endeavor to make sure that it is.

| sincerely, but in the meantime actively looking for an alternative to
| docbook,

Well, I do hope that we can react quickly enough to avoid that outcome :-)

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

-- 
Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com> | It is so comic to hear oneself called
http://nwalsh.com/            | old, even at ninety I suppose.--Alice
                              | James

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