Re: HTML 5, SMIL, Video

On 2/20/10 6:52 AM, "Dick Bulterman" <Dick.Bulterman@cwi.nl> wrote:

Hi all,

I think that Philip's answer is refreshingly honest. If I may
paraphrase, it is: I don't know anything about the alternative, but I
don't think we'll choose it.

I hope you appreciate that this is a frustrating standpoint for those of
us who actually HAVE thought about the short-, middle- and long-term
aspects of captions, subtitles, timed labels and motion text, both
within and outside of a document.

Of course, we could follow Silvia suggest to add yet another format for
in-line text. Maybe I'm just hopelessly ignorant in thinking that
modular functionally, extensibility and reuse make a positive difference
for addressing a11y concerns. Who knows, maybe the short-term is all
that really matters.

GF:  I'd like to add one further point and then I will cease hollering about SRT.  Among many other reasons, both DFXP and SmilText were invented to obviate the need for proprietary and/or non-standard text-display formats.  The working groups wanted to support caption/subtitle authors (and others) with open and standards-body-approved formats, thus eliminating the need to force authors to cater to the various incompatible, proprietary and/or non-standard text-display formats demanded by various media players.  Yes, I know that SRT is non-proprietary and simple to author, but for all the reasons stated over the past week I think it's also not necessary for us to use it.  Without triggering a political fight, dare I say that the W3C should re-use its own formats especially when those formats fulfill the specified need.  Unless I and others are totally off base, SmilText and DFXP complement each other and can fill all the needs of caption/subtitle authors.  Combine that with the suggestion of adding a method to convert SRT files to SmilText or DFXP (sorry, I don't know how to do this but I'm sure somebody here does) and that *could* be the middle ground we seek.


I'm away for our February vacation in Holland this coming week -- I'll
check the list sporadically, but may not be in a position to provide
daily fodder.

cheers,
-d.