FW: Transition Request for a FPWD : WebVTT

Folks,

Please see below the transition request for the First Public Working Draft of WebVTT specification. The document is developed by the W3C Timed Text WG and outlines the technology intended to be used mainly for marking up external text track resources such as closed captioning and subtitling of the video content.

What literally jumps at me while reviewing this document is a complete lack of differentiation between text resource as a unit carrying a semantic payload vs. text as a unit of displayed content. The former is self-contained component that can be sufficiently represented as a string of Unicode codepoints, while the latter absolutely needs a font resource to be identified for a text to become a visible and human-readable element of visual content. I am not sure if the WebVTT lack of connection between text and fonts (and CSS to that matter) is "by design" or whether it is a simple and common oversight (wouldn’t be a first time when the text display / font selection mechanism and the very presence of fonts as resources are taken for granted.)

Nevertheless, it seems really strange in this day and age of webfonts that any content author (even if it is something as simple as subtitles) wouldn’t care about font selection that suits one's particular content best, and wouldn't be concerned with a total lack of tools to make his/her own font choices to display text content as part of the more elaborately designed video presentation. I'd like to ask you to review the document identified below and consider preparing a set of comments that can be submitted as a formal response of the WebFonts WG to the Timed Text WG.

Thank you,
Vlad


-----Original Message-----
From: Thierry MICHEL [mailto:tmichel@w3.org] 
Sent: Wednesday, November 05, 2014 2:20 PM
To: Philippe Le Hegaret
Cc: chairs@w3.org; W3C Comm Team
Subject: Transition Request for a FPWD : WebVTT

This is a Transition Request from the Timed Text Group for a First Public Working Draft for WebVTT

- Document title: "WebVTT: The Web Video Text Tracks Format"
- URI: http://www.w3.org/TR/2014/WD-webvtt1-20141111/

- Estimated date of publication: 11 November 2014
- Short name: http://www.w3.org/TR/webvtt1/

- Record of approval of the transition request :
http://www.w3.org/2014/10/27-tt-minutes.html#item04


This document is not a delta specification.

Abstract:
This specification defines WebVTT, the Web Video Text Tracks format. Its main use is for marking up external text track resources in connection with the HTML <track> element.
WebVTT files provide captions or subtitles for video content, and also text video descriptions [MAUR], chapters for content navigation, and more generally any form of metadata that is time-aligned with audio or video content.

Status of this Document:
http://www.w3.org/TR/2014/WD-webvtt1-20141111/#h2_sotd



Thierry Michel
Team contact for the Timed text Working Group.

Received on Wednesday, 5 November 2014 20:06:04 UTC