What are situations with western languages where you'd use HTML 5's Ruby element?

Question

HTML 5 is introducing a new element: <ruby>; here's the W3C's description:

The ruby element allows one or more spans of phrasing content to be marked with ruby annotations. Ruby annotations are short runs of text presented alongside base text, primarily used in East Asian typography as a guide for pronunciation or to include other annotations. In Japanese, this form of typography is also known as furigana.

They then go on to give a few examples of Ruby annotations in use for Chinese and Japanese text. I'm wondering though: is this element going to be useful only for east-asian HTML documents, or are there good semantic applications for the <ruby> element in other western languages like English, German, Spanish, etc.?

Answer 1

As a linguist, I can see the benefits in using <ruby> for marking up linguistic examples with various theoretical notational conventions. One example that comes to mind is indicating tonal levels in autosegmental phonology. Here's a quick example I threw together that can be seen in the latest Webkit/Chromium (at least):

http://miketaylr.com/code/western_ruby.html

Currently, this type of notation is left for LaTex and friends, and if on the web, generally a non-accessible image.

Answer 2

                                                                                                                      _{id-ee-oh-SINK-ruh-sees}
Could be useful for people learning English, as our writing system has many idiosyncrasies that make it somewhat less than phonetic.

Answer 3

As I understand it, ruby annotations are not really relevant in Western languages because Western alphabets are (more or less) phonetic. In Japanese they are used to give a pronunciation guide for logographic characters which don't have obvious pronunciations (unless you've memorized them). I suppose the Western analog would be IPA notation in brackets following a word, but those are rarely used and I don't know if Ruby annotations would be appropriate for them.

Answer 4

My list:

• theoretical notational conventions (miketylr's answer)
  http://miketaylr.com/code/western_ruby.html
• language learning (Adam Bellaire's answer)
     _{id-ee-oh-SINK-ruh-sees}
  foo idiosyncrasies bar - made with ascii 'nbsp' art
• abbreviation, acronym, initialism (possibly - why hover?)
• learning technical terms of English origin accidentally translated to your non-english native language

I'm often forced to do the latter in uni. While the translated terminology is often consistent, very often it's not at all self-explaining or not as much as the original english one.

Also the same term may have been translated using several translation systems by different authors/groups.

Another problem group is when, for example, queue, row, series (and sometimes tuple) are translated to the very same word in your language.

Given a western language with less users, and the low percentage of technical people in the population, this actually makes learning the topic much easier directly from English and then learn the translations in a second step.

Ruby could be a tool to transform this into a one-step process, providing either the translations or the original as a "Furigana".