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)