You would read such a document in the following way: you choose a language that suits you and read it in that language. You only look at the other column when you want to know what your contractor can see in the text of the agreement. The text is not interlaced but it is vertically synchronized in order that you can know which passage in your language corresponds to which passage in the other language. HTML is unable to handle this situation except in the simple case where the text has no internal structure and can be split to passages that you can put in parallel as table data. Chris
-----Original Message----- From: Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Sunday, August 12, 2007 8:20 PM To: Krzysztof Żelechowski Cc: whatwg@lists.whatwg.org; WHAT WG List; Keryx Web Subject: Re: [whatwg] My case for Ruby-elements Krzysztof Żelechowski wrote: > Dnia niedziela, 12 sierpnia 2007 14:20, Keryx Web napisał: >> Today, in a private mail Simon Pieters said that HTML 5 will probably >> get the ruby-elements as well. >> >> I had intended to write about this to this list and now simply will ask >> if this is the case? >> >> Personally I have a special use-case. Being a theologian I would like to >> provide historical documents in an interlinear fashion: >> >> Kai ho logos sarx egeneto (Oh, yea, it should be in greek font....) >> and the word flesh became (Literal translation) >> 2532 3588 3056 4561 1096 (Strongs numbers) >> >> Imagine this page >> http://www.studylight.org/isb/bible.cgi?query=joh+1:14&it=nas&ot=bhs&nt=na& >> sr=1 with proper semantic markup! >> >> Of course, we theologians are a small minority of mankind, but the >> CJK-languages will profit from ruby as well, right? >> >> >> Lars Gunther > > I have just encountered a similar problem, the difference is my problem is > vertical. I have a document in two languages; the document has internal > structure (not just plain text). My intention is to display this document in > two columns with corresponding passages side by side retaining existing > markup. How would such a document be read linearly? Swapping between the two languages? If so, you could use a structure like: <div class="passage"> <p lang="en">Hello</p> <p lang="fr">Salut</p> </div> And style that with display:table-row and display:table-cell. This might also be an interesting use-case for the ALT element suggested on the public-html list: <div class="passage"> <p id="p4858" lang="en">Hello</p> <alt for="p4858 lang="fr"><p>Salut</p></alt> </div> -- Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis I am afraid there is no way to do it because existing markup cannot > span table rows. > BTW: What do you think about explicit kerning? You can move boxes with a > relative position around but the layout depends on their natural positions. I > understand this is rather off topic (CSS). > Example of application: > <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tournament_(graph_theory)> (currently viewable > with Internet Explorer only) > Best regards > Chris >