Re: WebVTT feedback

On Thu, Jun 7, 2012 at 7:22 PM, David Singer <singer@apple.com> wrote:

> While we can't do away with script detection, we can strongly encourage
> people to tag things properly.  Especially if we don't have time to specify
> uniform sniffing.
>

That's much easier with WebVTT than HTML.  WebVTT will have a primary
language specified (from <track>) much more regularly than HTML, where
people omit @lang more often than not and there's no good way to encourage
them to set it.

But, I'd suggest that it's possible to do away with script detection for
WebVTT (not for HTML).  Specify an ordered list of scripts.  If a character
isn't in the current language (or if no language was given), choose the
first script applicable to the character.  This would give a simple
fallback, and users would be expected to always specify a language,
including when mixing languages.  A script detection heuristic would be
better (as long as it's simple, reasonably accurate, and interoperable),
but if that's too hard, this would be much better than defaulting to the
locale-sensitive nightmare HTML is stuck in.  (I don't know how
implementable this is with the font rendering engines in browsers.)

(I don't have much hope of browsers switching away from HTML language and
charset detection that depends on the user's system language towards
something interoperable, but if somebody is more optimistic than I am I'd
love to see it tried.  Keeping that problem from leaking into WebVTT seems
like a more immediate problem, though, before we're stuck with it here too.)

-- 
Glenn Maynard