Re: Change Proposal for Issue 194

On Mon, Feb 13, 2012 at 6:36 AM, John Foliot <john@foliot.ca> wrote:
> Please find a Change Proposal for Issue 194 here:
> http://www.w3.org/html/wg/wiki/ChangeProposal/Issue194

Some feedback:

"This Change Proposal seeks to introduce a new attribute to the
<video> element, @transcript, which would takes as a value either an
URI to a separate page, or an IDREF to a location elsewhere on the
same page"

A relative URL starting with a fragment identifier is not an IDREF,
it's still just a URL. (It's the difference between "#fragment" and
"fragment"). An attribute cannot take a URL or an IDREF since they
cannot be programmatically distinguished.

"NOTE: Currently before the Working Group is ISSUE-30: Should HTML 5
include a longdesc attribute. Should this Issue be resolved by
reinstating @longdesc in HTML5, the use of @longdesc to address the
use-cases envisioned would likely be sufficient, making this proposal
redundant."

It would still require a (different) change proposal to add @longdesc
to the <video> element, right?

"Requires that browsers and other user-agents provide a mechanism for
users to discover the link to the transcript, and the ability to
access the transcript on demand."

This may be an obstacle to the attribute having any value and so give
rise to negative effects (accessibility failures) but it's not a
negative effect in itself.

Finally, you might consider defining a special interpretation when
@transcript points to a fragment on the same page that is a hyperlink
to allow authors to use the same mechanism to make a programmatic
association between a transcript link and the video element, without
making them provide the URL twice. This would enable this pattern:

<video controls transcript="#transcript">
  <source="_path_to_WebM_file_" type="video/webm">
  <source="_path_to_mp4_file_" type="video/mp4">
  <track="_path_to_TTML_file_" kind="captions">
    (etc.)
</video>

<a href="_path_to_transcript_(relative or absolute)_"
id="transcript">Transcript</a>

--
Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis

Received on Monday, 13 February 2012 07:40:33 UTC