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Chinese/Japanese/Korean names and their romanizations in a French article

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From: Pierre
Date: Mar 25, 2008 9:20AM

Hello all,

I'm currently managing a French Website about Asian culture, and
therefore the writers would like to write Chinese/Japanese/Korean
names in their original form (Chinese characters, kanji...). I would
like to store the "romanized" version of those names in the HTML
document, so readers who can't understand Chinese/Japanese/Korean can
still have an idea of the name.

For instance, I'd like to use "伍佰" in the text, and its Pinyin
romanization, "Wubai".

I thought about using HTML tags such as abbr, acronym or dfn, and then
use the title and lang attributes to display the romanization and the
language it comes from. I could display the romanized version between
brackets when the article is printed, and use it as a "tooltip" when
the article is read online.

What would be the best method to use in order to display such names in
a French text and to keep "readability" thanks to the romanized
versions of the characters?

I suppose I shouldn't use abbr nor acronym because of their original
meaning... what about dfn?

I heard about a ruby tag <http://www.w3.org/TR/1998/WD-ruby-19981221/>;
but it seems it's not implemented in any "classical" browsers
(Firefox, Opera, Internet Explorer) the way I'd like to use it...

Thanks in advance for any help you may provide!

--
Pierre Equoy
http://shinezine.fr
http://pierre.equoy.free.fr/
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