internationalisation after 17 years

[Michiel Kamermans <mkamerma@science.uva.nl>]

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.

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.

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. 
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.

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

-- 
Michiel Kamermans
,--------------------------------------------------------------
|  Masters student AI at the University of Amsterdam [0024538]
|  http://www.nihongoresources.com
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