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

On Fri, Dec 16, 2011 at 6:16 PM, David Singer <singer@apple.com> wrote:

> On Dec 7, 2011, at 14:38 , Glenn Maynard wrote:
>
> On Wed, Dec 7, 2011 at 8:20 AM, 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.
>>
>
> It sounds like you're describing very old legacy practice, possibly
> originating from media without dynamic captioning, like VHS.  When you can
> switch the language at runtime, which everything since DVD has been able to
> do, it's hard to think of a reason to do this.
>
> There are valid uses of mixed-language captioning, not least when the
> content being captioned is mixed-language.
>

Absolutely.  I've been arguing for inline language tagging in WebVTT for a
while, as a direct hook into the @lang attribute in HTML.

I was only responding to the particular use case of combining whole
subtitle tracks for different languages into a single track.  The use case
given was a single subtitle track containing both Hebrew captions and
English subtitles; selecting the track shows both languages.  I don't think
that's a convincing use case, for the reasons above, unless someone has a
reason to actually *want* to do that.

(If a *user* wants to see m**ultiple subtitles at once, that's a valid use
case--I've wanted something like that before now and then, myself. But
making tracks for every combination of languages is obviously--I hope!--the
wrong way to do it.  The spec already allows both UAs and scripts to enable
multiple tracks at once, which I think is the right approach.)

I would have thought that the existence of international content, which has
> (audio) mixed language, was a non-zero case.  Educational material that's
> teaching a language may well embed that language in the student's native
> language, as well, and so on.
>
> It's also possible that VTT will be used where the text has both the
> original language and a latin-alphabet transcription, in two different
> writing directions.
>
> 'xxxxxx (Oorance), he called'  where xxxxxx is in arabic; [Oorance was the
> name given by the locals to Lawrence of Arabia, as I recall]
>

I've mentioned this use case before, actually:
http://lists.whatwg.org/htdig.cgi/whatwg-whatwg.org/2011-January/030035.html

Of course, use cases being raised independently by different people is a
good thing.  :)

-- 
Glenn Maynard