Re: HTML 5, SMIL, Video

one brief comment from me below; i'm out of the office today and will have to save my other comments for tomorrow.
geoff/wgbh


On 2/18/10 7:09 AM, "Dick Bulterman" <Dick.Bulterman@cwi.nl> wrote:

Hey Silvia,

> If the choice was between DFXP and SmilText, which do you think have
> larger market uptake and are supported by more applications? Also,
> which do you think is more powerful?

 From my POV, smiText has the advantage that it is easier to implement,
is more suited for in-line use in HTML, is layered in that timing is
independent from styling and that motion text (if desired) is also
available. The fact that smilText is inherently streamable gives it an
advantage. The syntax is also much more HTML-like, and it support
relative and absolute timing. That's from my perspective. I think that
DXFP has a place as an interchange format -- which was its original
design goal -- not primarily as a delivery instance.  It also have the
advantage that it has actually completed the recommendation process.

(SRT, which has huge user uptake, is not sufficiently easier to use than
smilText, it is not XML and there is nobody who really 'owns' it. From a
standardization perspective, I would tend to view it as a non-starter,
were it not that it provides lowest common denominator support -- but,
so does Fortran.)

GF:  I very much agree here with Dick.  The things that make me most apprehensive about SRT are...

-- it has no ownership
-- it has no standards-group backing
-- it has very little, if any, styling (plz correct me if I'm wrong)

For the W3C to issue a recommendation that itself recommends the use of a non-standard caption-text format would, at the very least, appear rather awkward.

Ease of authoring can't really be used as a basis for its consideration.  John F made an excellent point the other night:  unless they're just inserting occasional blocks of text, most people who write captions will not be writing them by hand with NotePad or TextEdit, they'll use an application like MAGpie, Subtitle Workshop or a broadcast-level suite to create and format them.

>From my perspective, SmilText or profile of DFXP (or both) would be best as a recommended caption-text format.  That's not to say we shouldn't include SRT in the list, but I just don't think it should be the primary recommendation.