Re: Some comments on the requirements

Just some comments on Bert's comments:

At 20:50 03/02/04 +0100, Bert Bos wrote:

>I Architecture
>
>2 Have a valid XML representation
>
>     Apart from the fact that this contradicts the first requirement
>     ("simple and easy"), I think that limiting the syntax up front is
>     not very useful. Especially so, because of the timed-text formats
>     (and proposed formats) that I have seen so far, those that were
>     not based on XML were by far the most elegant. (E.g, those of
>     Quicktime and Mplayer.)
>
>8 Allow the language of the text to be identified using xml:lang
>
>     A corollary of the previous comment. The language should indeed be
>     identified somehow, but it could be by other means than XML.
>     Indeed, it could be outside the document itself, e.g., in an HTTP
>     header.

HTTP headers won't work for mixed text. I think the great benefit
of using XML is that some basic problem (general syntax, character
encoding, xml:lang) are already well solved. And I think that the
above requirement 'have a valid XML representation' doesn't even
exclude alternative representations (which I personally don't
think are needed).


>11 Have a default UNICODE font
>
>     Is it really a requirement to have a standard font? What font
>     would that be? Arial? Maybe the intention was to require that the
>     format supports all Unicode characters, rather than a specific
>     font?

It looks indeed like this requirement is rather unprecise.
It may be that the format should support fallback behavior,
or that it should require such behavior from applications.
It maybe that it identifies a particular generic font name
that is supposed to have complete Unicode coverage (but
'complete Unicode coverage' is a moving target.
Requiring that the format supports all Unicode characters
would be pretty much obvious given the general Internationalization
policy at W3C, and not worth mentioning explicitly.


Regards,    Martin.

Received on Thursday, 6 February 2003 17:34:09 UTC