Re: on SRT...

On Wed, Feb 24, 2010 at 3:38 AM, David Singer <singer@apple.com> wrote:
> I don't have a problem with DFXP, but I think we'll need to profile it -- it contains elements for support of (for example) 3GPP Timed Text, such as scroll-in, and also for out-of-time-order sequencing, neither of which I think we want in this case, do we?
>

I agree about the need for profiling. I don't mind about the scroll-in
as long as we can map the 3GPP markup to some javascript action for
the browser. But this is definitely a feature of the more complex
kind.

Most of the DFXP files I have seen so far in the wild are really simple.

For example this one from Apple:
http://www.apple.com/media/us/mac/imac/2009/tours/apple-imac-design_video-cc-us-20091111_cc.xml
which relates to http://www.apple.com/imac/
is basically a SRT file with a default display style. (Ignore the
metadata element which they are using and which incidentally has
non-standard attributes).

That default display style can easily be mapped onto a div and css, so
I would regard this as not very hard to implement. This markup could
be a level 0 profile.

There is also some html formatting markup inside the <p> elements,
such as <br/>, <b> and <i>, which can just be kept for HTML (obivously
needs to be well parsed and filtered so as not to create security
issues). But we could also consider that as part of level 0.

Then, level 0 provides the ability for externally provided styling and
for prettier text - a good improvement over SRT and not overly
challenging to implement I would think.

Next, we can go through DFXP and add selective features that make
sense to create a level 1,2, and maybe make level 3 the full DFXP
spec.

I would consider this as a viable way to create a path towards
introducing DFXP support in steps, which do not ask too much
implementation requirements of the browser vendors in one go. I'd be
curious what the browser vendors think about this!

Cheers,
Silvia.

Received on Tuesday, 23 February 2010 22:39:50 UTC