ample from Japanese:
- base text: yo-mu (means: “reading in the base form”; with the Japanese syllabic script, the boundaries between the morphemes “yom” and “m” cannot be expressed)
- Ruby for a segmentation of morphological boundaries: contains a romanized version of “yomu” with the correct boundaries “yom-mu”.
Implementations: Sunny side-up?
Using the Live DOM Viewer I tried to figure out more or less how it works. Not everything is covered, but the basic parsing rules are here; simple research.
We have not found an implementation report of Ruby in different browsers, user agents and in authoring tools (the too often forgotten ones). If someone could create an implementation report using the Ruby Annotation Test Cases developed by ???? and also the Ruby Test Cases developed by Internationalization Activity, it would help to have a good picture of the implementation landscape. Simple Ruby annotations are implemented in Amaya. There is also an xpi extension for Ruby which is available for Firefox and Mozilla and help to visualize simple and complex ruby annotation. Unfortunately it’s not a native implementation in Mozilla rendering engine, which has still an open issue for Ruby markup.
So we are not there yet, but I would say that almost all the information is available for helping developers to implement in their products but there are real benefits using ruby in a page. For example, we found this page giving a table which contains the birthplaces and native names of celebrities (actors, singers, sports figures, etc.) in different languages. (to see with Firefox and the XPI extension).
Any comments or additional information are welcome, specifically from the internationalization specialists… ;)
More information / Reminder
- FAQ: What is Ruby?
- Tutorial: Ruby Markup and Styling
- Test Materials for Ruby
- Ruby at Wikipedia
- Translations of Ruby Specification in different languages
- Screenshot of ruby rendered in Firefox 1.5
- Screenshot of ruby rendered in Amaya
- XPI extension to have a rendering of ruby in Mozilla and Firefox
- To download Amaya which helps to visualize simple Ruby