Non-standard This feature is non-standard and is not on a standards track. Do not use it on production sites facing the Web: it will not work for every user. There may also be large incompatibilities between implementations and the behavior may change in the future.
The HTML Ruby Base (<rb>
) element is used to delimit the base text component of a <ruby>
annotation, i.e. the text that is being annotated. One <rb>
element should wrap each separate atomic segment of the base text.
The source for this interactive example is stored in a GitHub repository. If you'd like to contribute to the interactive examples project, please clone https://github.com/mdn/interactive-examples and send us a pull request.
Content categories | None. |
Permitted content | As a child of a <ruby> element.
|
Tag omission | The end tag can be omitted if the element is immediately followed by an <rt> , <rtc> , or <rp> element or another <rb> element, or if there is no more content in the parent element.
|
Permitted parents | A <ruby> element.
|
Permitted ARIA roles | Any |
DOM interface | HTMLElement
|
Attributes
This element only includes the global attributes.
Usage notes
- Ruby annotations are for showing pronunciation of East Asian characters, like using Japanese furigana or Taiwanese bopomofo characters. The
<rb>
element is used to separate out each segment of the ruby base text. - Even though
<rb>
is not an empty element, it is common to just include the opening tag of each element in the source code, so that the ruby markup is less complex and easier to read. The browser can then fill in the full element in the rendered version. - You need to include one
<rt>
element for each base segment/<rb>
element that you want to annotate.
Examples
In this example, we provide an annotation for the original character equivalent of "Kanji":
<ruby>
<rb>漢<rb>字
<rp>(</rp><rt>kan<rt>ji<rp>)</rp>
</ruby>
Note how we've included two <rb>
elements, to delimit the two separate parts of the ruby base text. The annotation on the other hand is delimited by two <rt>
elements.
Note that we could also write this example with the two base text parts annotated completely separately. In this case we don't need to include <rb>
elements:
<ruby>
漢 <rp>(</rp><rt>Kan</rt><rp>)</rp>
字 <rp>(</rp><rt>ji</rt><rp>)</rp>
</ruby>
<ruby> <rb>漢<rb>字 <rp>(</rp><rt>kan<rt>ji<rp>)</rp> </ruby>
body {
font-size: 22px;
}
The output looks like so:
The HTML above might look something like this when rendered by a browser without ruby support:
漢字 (kan ji)
body {
font-size: 22px;
}
Note: See the article about the <ruby>
element for further examples.
Specifications
Specification | Status | Comment |
---|---|---|
HTML5The definition of '<rb>' in that specification. | Recommendation |
Browser compatibility
The compatibility table in this page is generated from structured data. If you'd like to contribute to the data, please check out https://github.com/mdn/browser-compat-data and send us a pull request.
Update compatibility data on GitHub
Desktop | Mobile | |||||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Chrome Partial support 5 Partial support 5 Notes' Blink has support for parsing the |
Edge Partial support 79 Partial support 79 Notes' Blink has support for parsing the |
Firefox
Full support 38 |
IE
Full support 5 |
Opera Partial support 15 Partial support 15 Notes' Blink has support for parsing the |
Safari Partial support 5 Partial support 5 Notes' Safari has support for parsing the |
WebView Android Partial support 37 Partial support 37 Notes' Blink has support for parsing the |
Chrome Android Partial support 18 Partial support 18 Notes' Blink has support for parsing the |
Firefox Android
Full support 38 |
Opera Android Partial support 14 Partial support 14 Notes' Blink has support for parsing the |
Safari iOS Partial support Partial Partial support Partial Notes' Safari has support for parsing the |
Samsung Internet Android Partial support Partial Partial support Partial Notes' Blink has support for parsing the |
Legend
- Full support
- Full support
- Partial support
- Partial support
- Non-standard. Expect poor cross-browser support.'
- Non-standard. Expect poor cross-browser support.
- See implementation notes.'
- See implementation notes.
See also
<rb>: The Ruby Base element by Mozilla Contributors is licensed under CC-BY-SA 2.5.