Someone wrote in [[wikipedia:Bug reports]] today about the ruby tags (<ruby>, <rb>, <rt>, <rp>) being disabled, and requesting to have them reinstated.
For those who don't know, ruby text is a feature of East Asian typography in which a pronunciation guide in alphabetic or syllablic characters is put above or below the equivalent Chinese characters. These are used extensively in books for children and foreigners, as well as in regular publications for rare characters -- for instance, now-obsolete characters used in historical names that you'd expect to see in an encyclopedia.
Basically, it's the equivalent of things like "Lumière (loo-me-AIR)", but because it goes outside the line of regular text, requires a special HTML tag to do it.
It's a simple matter to include ruby, rb, rt, and rp in the list of allowed tags, but I promised to ask the group before adding more tags.
The primary argument in favor of including them is that they might be useful on the (currently rather empty) Japanese and Chinese wikipedias, and as a demonstration in the English wikipedia article [[Ruby]].
Arguments against are double: * Using the tags is kind of complicated, roughly like making an HTML table. This may discourage users from using them regularly anyway.
* As far as I know, the ruby tags are currently only supported by recent versions of Internet Explorer, and aren't actually in the HTML 4.01 standard. They are, however, officially available as an extension to XHTML - see http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/REC-ruby-20010531/
However, properly formed ruby text will come out looking okay on browsers that don't support the tags (ie, like "Lumière (loo-me-AIR)"), so there's no harm to using the tags where appropriate.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
From: "Brion L. VIBBER" brion@pobox.com
Someone wrote in [[wikipedia:Bug reports]] today about the ruby tags (<ruby>, <rb>, <rt>, <rp>) being disabled, and requesting to have them reinstated.
Well you probably know that my position is that allowing HTML tags was one of the biggest mistakes ever made in the history of Wikipedia software. But they are here now and we can't make them go away, so we have to deal with them anyway. These tags look very useful to me, so I agree with allowing them.
As a technical remark I would like to see a central array or something that records what tags are allowed (and perhaps even how they might be nested and what attributes they may have). For instance, in presenting the search results I have to deal with HTML tags that might be present, and it would be pleasant if this would automatically adapt if new tags are allowed.
-- Jan Hidders
On mer, 2002-02-27 at 02:51, Jan Hidders wrote:
From: "Brion L. VIBBER" brion@pobox.com
Someone wrote in [[wikipedia:Bug reports]] today about the ruby tags (<ruby>, <rb>, <rt>, <rp>) being disabled, and requesting to have them reinstated.
Well you probably know that my position is that allowing HTML tags was one of the biggest mistakes ever made in the history of Wikipedia software. But they are here now and we can't make them go away, so we have to deal with them anyway.
Heh. :) Well, the alternative is to provide our own special wiki markup for *every* feature that people need, including complicated things like tables. At some point the simplicity of the wiki markup and the complexity of the features collide, and you may as well make use of peoples' existing experience with the HTML codes.
These tags look very useful to me, so I agree with allowing them.
(see also a few messages to this effect in intlwiki-l)
Great, I'll go ahead and add them then.
As a technical remark I would like to see a central array or something that records what tags are allowed (and perhaps even how they might be nested and what attributes they may have).
Hmm, that could be done. Guess it's time to rewrite removeHTMLtags() again. (yay)
For instance, in presenting the search results I have to deal with HTML tags that might be present, and it would be pleasant if this would automatically adapt if new tags are allowed.
Can you just run removeHTMLtags() separately over each chunk of extracted text? That should automatically close off tags, etc. I haven't taken a look at the search code in a while though so I'm not sure how it works at the moment...
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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