Re: Metadata in the VTT file header (bug 15851), use cases (and a need to close this)

On Aug 30, 2012, at 3:06 , Simon Pieters <simonp@opera.com> wrote:

> On Thu, 30 Aug 2012 02:21:28 +0200, Glenn Maynard <glenn@zewt.org> wrote:
> 
>>> key: |
>>> valueline
>>> valueline
>>> …
>>> .
>>> 
>> 
>> Also, &escapes; need to be allowed, so that "-->" can be escaped to
>> "--&gt;".  This is needed for single-line headers, too.  

Why?  We're in a block of text whose only parsing rule is that it terminates in a blank line.  What am I missing?

>> Other than that
>> one oddity, however, this format requiers no escaping except for prefixing
>> backslashes, and unescaping can be as simple as "if the line begins with a
>> backslash, remove it".
> 
> OK, now this syntax is becoming so horrible I don't know what to make of it. Please, let's take a step back and think again. We don't need to put everything between the "WEBVTT" and a blank line. We can have cue-like blocks for multiline things, e.g.:
> 
> WEBVTT
> language: fr
> kind: subtitles
> 
> STYLE
> #foo { color:green }
> i { font-family:serif }
> 
> foo
> 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:05.000
> testing <i>testing</i>
> 
> 
> This is backwards compatible!

Alas, it ain't.  Existing parsers will try to treat 

> STYLE
> #foo { color:green }
> i { font-family:serif }

as the first cue.

> No escapes needed! It doesn't support embedding "-->", but I'd rather change the parser to only be aggressive about "-->" after the first real cue than to support &escapes; in metadata values.

Right, I agree.

I think the following is equally readable (ignoring whether STYLE is ALL CAPS or not, and not really considering how one applies  styles to cues)

WEBVTT
language: fr
kind: subtitles
STYLE: |
#foo { color:green }
i { font-family:serif }
.

00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:05.000
<c.foo>testing <i>testing</i></c.foo>


> 
> -- 
> Simon Pieters
> Opera Software

David Singer
Multimedia and Software Standards, Apple Inc.

Received on Thursday, 30 August 2012 18:14:41 UTC