RE: Timed tracks

Regarding a) and b) It was you that compared the accessibility level to HTML, so I was curious as to what you meant by that, but yes in general making the format available as marked up text achieves the goals you state.

There is a trade-off between inventing new elements for every possible semantic role, and having an annotation mechanism; there are merits to both. On balance the TTWG felt that due to the large, and somewhat open ended number of possible roles, that an attribute value was preferable to convey this metadata, particularly as there are a number of different axes of metadata that may need to be conveyed. 

>>I would have thought that everyone that author TTML files, and that want to apply styling in the TTML, would have to learn XSL:FO?

That seems to be a common misconception. The TTML specification is intended to provide adequate documentation of what all the style attributes do. It is not expected as I said that many authors will be hand crafting caption files. Those that do might find that knowledge of XSL:FO may be of help, but it would not be a requirement, Knowledge of CSS would probably also work, particularly for the attributes that are commonly employed like colour and font. The controls offered by TTML are far fewer than one would find in a typical HTML/CSS stylesheet, so it is much less likely that complex edge cases will be encountered.


-----Original Message-----
From: Jonas Sicking [mailto:jonas@sicking.cc] 
Sent: Sunday, May 09, 2010 8:35 AM
To: Sean Hayes
Cc: Philip Jägenstedt; public-html@w3.org
Subject: Re: Timed tracks

On Sat, May 8, 2010 at 5:43 AM, Sean Hayes <Sean.Hayes@microsoft.com> wrote:
> "There is no way to for example find every instance when a specific person says "hello", or to style all narrator text in italics and surrounded by '[' ']'. Compared to HTML it seems like a big step backwards accessibility wise."
>
> Perhaps you'd like to explain to me how a) these are accessibility issues and b) how they are done in HTML.

a) I always thought of accessibility as making data more easily consumable, not merely making content available to blind/colorblind/deaf/hard-of-hearing people. Allowing better searching as well as applying personal styling seems make data more easily consumable.

b) As far as I know no one is suggesting using HTML as markup, so I'm not sure how that is relevant?

> But they are supported in TTML thus:
> <p ttm:agent="JohnDoe" ttm:role="narration" 
> style="narrator">[narration]</p>

Ah, that is indeed good. Although the markup is a bit verbose.
Something like <narration>narration</narration> seems much nicer.

> "So why should we ask everyone that wants to style captions to use XSL:FO?"
>
> Nobody is asking authors to do that, the only folks that need to understand XSL:FO are the QA team for the TTML implementation. And even that won't be necessary if they are conversant with CSS3. In fact most caption authors won't ever see the format they produce, because they will use a tool; and if you have ever tried to write any significant amount of captioning by hand, you will know why.

I would have thought that everyone that author TTML files, and that want to apply styling in the TTML, would have to learn XSL:FO?

/ Jonas

Received on Sunday, 9 May 2010 08:13:38 UTC