Posted by Alan J. Flavell on 11/15/24 11:47

On Sat, 13 May 2006, Toby Inkster wrote:

> The X part of XHTML doesn't really help
> ordinary folk like you and me to create new elements like the above.

Strictly speaking, what you say is true. And I wouldn't actually
recommend doing what I'm about to discuss, for real-life web pages,
but it can be an interesting experiment.

Let's assume for the sake of discussion that Ruby Annotation hadn't
yet been specified by W3C. And indeed the majority of browsers behave
as if it hadn't been. Now take a look at
http://www.w3.org/People/mimasa/test/schemas/NOTE-ruby-implementation#stylesheets
which presents some sample CSS stylesheets for it.

I tried this out, at
http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/~flavell/www/umusalu.html , using
HTML-flavoured markup (but XHTML can be just as effective), and it
sort-of works in a few browsers, even though the browsers have no
knowledge or understanding of the markup itself, and are doing no more
than applying the supplied CSS rules to what, to them, are undefined
tags. I didn't even bother to supply a custom DOCTYPE to include the
syntax for these elements.

But I must repeat that I wouldn't recommend doing that for a real
production web page.

regards

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