Update on the status of DAPT

It’s been a while since we talked about DAPT in this group, so I have an update and a pointer to a question for discussion.

Status of DAPT
============

DAPT<https://www.w3.org/TR/DAPT/> is currently in Candidate Recommendation and stable.

The implementation report<https://www.w3.org/wiki/TimedText/DAPT_Implementation_Report> shows that we have almost enough implementations to request transition to Recommendation.

There are some “at risk” features that are all-but-one directly related to audio description requirements, and concern how audio recordings of description text should be managed:

  *   Should they be base64 encoded and inserted directly in the DAPT document?
     *   If so, should they all be in the head section of the document, and referenced where needed, or should they be inline? Is there a reason to support both options?
  *   Should they be bundled as external files in some kind of (as yet undefined) package format?
  *   Should we support the ability to specify more than one alternative for each audio recording, e.g. in different formats or at different URLs?

I’ve opened these questions up for discussion at https://github.com/w3c/dapt/discussions/335 in the hope that practitioners will be able to help us resolve these questions, and we can either remove at-risk features, or remove the “at-risk” flag and decide to continue requiring support.

Input welcome, ideally on the discussion in GitHub, or by reply to this, or, if folk are interested, I could set up a call to discuss the options.

Kind regards,

Nigel