[Wikipedia-l] Allowing HTML for ruby text?

[Brion L. VIBBER]

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)