Ruby for Furigana in HTML5

This is neat:

Ruby characters (ルビ^?) are small, annotative glosses that can be placed above or to the right of a Chinese character when writing languages with logographic characters such as Chinese or Japanese to show the pronunciation. Typically called just ruby or rubi, such annotations are usually used as a pronunciation guide for relatively obscure characters. [Wikipedia]

Support for Ruby will be added to the new and rapidly evolving version of HTML, HTML5. That means that it will be possible to do stuff like this right in a web page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Furigana

Interestingly for language folks, this markup could also be used for a simple variety of interlinear glossing. One could imagine marking up interlinearized linguistic texts this way:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlinear_text

So you could have now with a <ruby> tag containing Gila, and so forth. I’m not sure that this is the best solution for interlinearizing in HTML (what if you have more than one tier?), but it’s intriguing.

• The WHATWG Blog » Blog Archive » Implementation progress on the HTML5 element
• 4.6 Text-level semantics — HTML 5: §4.6.20 The ruby element