[sword-devel] JapKougo

[Chris Little]

DM Smith wrote:
> I'm wondering whether it is encoded sufficiently. I see how the module 
> is marked, but it doesn't seem that it maps well to the definition of 
> ruby. I'm not sure of the OSIS semantic that is being used.

For those who haven't looked at the markup, the first ruby annotated 
word in JapKougo is marked thus:

<w gloss="かみ">神</w>

The word in the text is wrapped in a <w/> element. The ruby appears as 
the gloss value. I considered both the xlit attribute and the gloss 
attribute, but ultimately felt that latter was more appropriate to ruby.

I'm not sure what definition of ruby you've seen, but they're basically 
Kana equivalents of Chinese characters used in Japanese text. (It's also 
used in Chinese texts with Bopomofo characters to indicate 
pronunciation.) The ruby may represent a simple phonemic transliteration 
of the logographic chracter, but need not necessarily--hence the choice 
of the semantically broad gloss over xlit. Ultimately we should expect 
to see ruby behave similarly to glosses in an interlinear text, and 
gloss is the intended location for word-for-word interlinear glosses.

The fact that ruby appear inline currently is because we have OSIS 
filters that pass along gloss attributes as text rather than with some 
kind of special display markup. I don't even know that the HTML filters 
do this; it may be limited to OSISRTF. When I encoded the Japanese 
texts, I was expecting the gloss attribute to be unhandled and thus 
hidden entirely, but apparently I or someone else did some basic code 
that renders the gloss attribute.

--Chris