Re: Displaying multiple lines in WebVTT

On Wed, Apr 18, 2012 at 1:23 AM, David Singer <singer@apple.com> wrote:

> I think some have argued that author line-breaks should not be permitted
> or possible in the content itself.
>

(I don't think anyone is arguing that.)


> We're not writing paragraphs, such as in HTML, where inserting line breaks
> in the source is sometimes desirable to make the source readable, and then
> they need converting to whitespace. Cues need to be 'short'.
>
> So I am not sure we need (a), which means we don't need (b), which means,
> for me, that (c) is fine; if you author a line-break, you meant it.
>

Again, the problem with this is that it will result in a huge number of
caption files being manually word wrapped.  It will cause people to
hand-wrap captions where there's no need for it, which will make many
WebVTT files break when viewed in larger fonts than the author happened to
be using.  Using explicit <br> will make it clear to authors that, like
HTML, you should usually be leaving wrapping to the UA and only use <br>
when you explicitly need a break for reasons other than word-wrapping.

I'm pretty confident in this prediction; many VTT users are going to be
previous SRT users.  With SRT you *were* required to do word wrapping
yourself, which I think is obviously unacceptable on the Web, where you can
never make hard assumptions about users' font sizes (or other aspects of
font rendering).

We can fix this easily now, by making the intuitive usage of the format the
correct one, or we can give ourselves headaches trying to convince people
to stop doing things incorrectly later (which doesn't work on the Web).

-- 
Glenn Maynard