[Bug 12043] For better compatibility with .SRT, could the FULL STOP be replaced with a COMMA? So instead of 00:00:00.000 it would be 00:00:00,000

http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=12043

--- Comment #4 from Philip Jägenstedt <philipj@opera.com> 2011-02-16 09:04:57 UTC ---
(In reply to comment #3)
> We used to support both "." and ",", but it was simplified to just "." when
> WebVTT stopped being intentionally compatible with SRT because it turns out SRT
> is way the heck more complicated than it appears to be. If it wasn't for SRT
> there really would be no reason to support "," as far as I can tell; formats
> like this usually use the US locale in their syntax.
> 
> foolip: do you want to add anything here? IIRC it was your idea to remove
> support for ",".

Short answer: I still think we should support only "." as the separator.

The only compatibility issue here is going from SRT to WebVTT, where it isn't
enough to just add "WEBVTT FILE". I don't think we should keep trying stay
closely compatible with SRT. Doing that means that we have less room to improve
the timing line format, add comment syntax, etc.

While making it hard for authors isn't exactly a design goal, there's something
to be said for "encouraging" people to use converters which will also help
catch non-UTF-8 files, fix timestamps with less than 3 decimals, etc.

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Received on Wednesday, 16 February 2011 09:05:00 UTC