RE: Support for advanced caption features (inc rollup)

On Tue, 4 Dec 2012, Goldstein, Glenn wrote:
> 
> are you making the point that webVTT has lots of interesting uses, but 
> rendering TV-style captions is not one of them?

WebVTT is a caption format for the Web. It handles all the same use cases 
as other caption formats. What it is not, however, is a presentation 
format intended to support all the same exact renderings of other caption 
formats.


> rollup captions are a significant aspect of live television captioning, 

I disagree. It's an aspect of legacy live television captioning that is 
unnecessary in the modern Web world. There are studies showing that it's 
less good for users than captions that just stays still. It is only 
necessary in situations where the video is not delayed, but on the Web, 
there is an inherent delay, and there is no harm in adding another second 
of delay to make the captions stay still.


> and if we are going to faithfully present those captions on the internet

There is no reason to do that. That's what I think is misguided.


> then it is essential that the format support the rollup representation 
> and rendering.

That's not WebVTT. WebVTT was never designed to be a faithful 
representation of another caption format. It was designed to be the HTML 
of Web captioning. It was not designed to be the PDF of Web captioning.

WebVTT does a _terrible_ job of representing another format's rendering. 
It doesn't even guarantee that captions will end up where they are 
specified to end up. There's no way to set colours or fonts. There's no 
way to guarantee that <i> will be italics, even.

If people want to represent another caption format, they should either use 
that format, or convert it to a format whose use cases include faithful 
representation of that other caption format's features.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Tuesday, 4 December 2012 20:14:55 UTC