[Bug 10320] Allow an arbitrary string as the voice for forwards compatilbity

http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=10320

--- Comment #8 from Philip Jägenstedt <philipj@opera.com> 2010-09-30 13:06:55 UTC ---
(In reply to comment #5)
> If we make voices be just regular WebSRT cue spans (like <b> or <i>), we also
> introduce a number of new problems:
> 
>  - what does it mean to nest voices?

It means that one speaker begins speaking and another joins in half-way, much
like the chipmunks. I doubt people would go to this effort in their markup, but
the semantics of it is clear.

>  - what does it mean to have voices nested inside <i> or <b> or worse still,
> <rt>?

This indeed makes no sense, so voices ought to be top-level only.

>  - what does it mean to have a cue with multiple voices, if we ever have an API
> that lets you filter on voice?

Return all cues where the voice appears. If the filter takes multiple voices,
return the cues where both voices appear, matching how getElementsByClassName
works.

> Still, there are definitely use cases for having a cue with different voices...
> British subtitles for example often have different colours per speaker and will
> mash them all into one paragraph. And I agree that it would be more usable to
> have speakers be named rather than numbered.
> 
> We could force them to be only at the top level of a cue, with, as you suggest,
> a special syntax for custom ones, and the default ones being "just tags". The
> reason they weren't before is that voice was a higher-level construct than part
> of the cue text; in retrospect, I should have just made it a V:foo setting. But
> that doesn't work if there are multiple voices per cue.
> 
>    <v mary> ... </v> ?
>    <.mary> ... </.mary> ?
> 
> The end tag could be optional, meaning it goes to the end of the cue. Maybe do
> this only if the voice is given at the start of the cue?

I still think we should try as far as possible to allow authoring of subitles
with and without HoH information in the same file, so it would probably help if
the voice was a string that could, when the user so wishes, be appended to the
beginning of the cue, as "Mary: I had a little lamb". Maybe:

<v Mary>
<v Peter Pan>
<v who="Peter Pan">

I'm not sure what the best syntax is, but you get the idea.

I'm at <http://universalsubtitles.org/opensubtitles2010> today, I'll have a
chat with some of the HoH participants to see what they think makes sense. In
particular, I'm not sure how critical the semantics of different speakers is,
as opposed to just being able to convey it presentationally.

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Received on Thursday, 30 September 2010 13:07:03 UTC