Re: WebVTT bidi: should a cue be allowed to contain more than one paragraph?

On Thu, Dec 8, 2011 at 1:22 AM, Simon Pieters <simonp@opera.com> wrote:
> On Wed, 07 Dec 2011 14:20:34 +0100, Aharon (Vladimir) Lanin
> <aharon@google.com> wrote:
>> 3. I believe that there are use cases that require allowing a cue to
>> contain more than one (bidi) paragraph. For example, there at least used
>> to
>> be a widespread practice in Israel for Hebrew-language films to come with
>> subtitles that gave the dialogue in both the original Hebrew and in
>> English
>> translation, simultaneously on separate lines.
>
>
> The two languages don't need to be in the same cue. They don't even need to
> be in the same file. You could have one track for Hebrew, another for
> English, and enable both.

>From the point of view of authoring that information, two WebVTT files
work. However, the HTML spec says that only one track of kind captions
or subtitles can be showing at any point in time
http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/video.html#sourcing-out-of-band-text-tracks
, so display of two languages would require one to be subtitles and
the other to be metadata and rendered by JavaScript. I would therefore
think that they should be in the same subtitle file. However, I would
also recommend making them different cues, even if they are fully
synchronized. At least that way you can position them better.


> Currently WebVTT does not support declaring language at all, although there
> have been discussions to add it (per file, per block, per cue and/or intra
> cue). Use cases presented in this area might inform both the direction and
> language issues.

To satisfy Aharon's use case with both Hebrew and English on screen -
even if provided in different cues - we will at minimum need a means
to specify language per cue. Probably more flexible would be a means
to associate a block of text within a cue with a language.

The use case for a per file language declaration is that not every
webvtt file will be consumed by a Web browser, so the language can't
be provided in a @srclang attribute of the "glue" markup and has to be
provided elsewhere. Since this just sets the default language for the
file, it does not solve the issues with bidi within a single cue's
paragraph.

Silvia.

Received on Wednesday, 7 December 2011 21:19:14 UTC