Comment 154 for bug 114441

The W3C i18n WG did discuss this with Hixie but took an action to look into things in more detail. See
https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=10830#c59
https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=10830#c75

Just after meeting with Hixie we put out a document that began looking at ruby use cases and discussing how the various markup models apply to each. After several iterations and a lot of discussion, we have just published the final version of that document as a WG Note, see http://www.w3.org/TR/ruby-use-cases/. We tried to make the HTML5 approach work for the use cases we knew to be needed, but the upshot is that in the end the extension specification at http://darobin.github.io/html-ruby/ seems to us the best approach.

Earlier this year we had a workshop about internationalization and ebooks, and ruby and vertical text were ranked by attendees as two most urgent requirements needing support for their markets. After the workshop, we had expressions of interest to implement the extension spec from Google and Safari teams. We also spoke with Microsoft, who expressed interest.

The CSS Ruby module spec was recently republished (http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-ruby/) with changes that were designed collaboratively with the approach in the ruby extension spec. The processing and terminology are aligned so the semantics and styling match up.