Re: Shifting gears for a second (was RE: Codecs for <video> and <audio>)

On Fri, Jul 3, 2009 at 1:01 PM, John Foliot<jfoliot@stanford.edu> wrote:
> Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
>>
>> If you're willing to encode video files twice, the following markup
>> [1] will provide embedded video with CSS stylability and a consistent
>> JavaScript API in the latest versions of Firefox and Safari, and in
>> upcoming versions of Chrome and Opera, and likely in other upcoming
>> WebKit-based browsers for mobile platforms:
>>
>> <video>
>>      <source src="example-video.mp4" type="video/mp4" />
>>      <source src="example-video.ogv" type="video/ogg" />
>> </video>
>>
>
> This observer is, of course, concerned how/where the captioning piece is
> in this example, and further where captioning is in the current spec.
>
> In an earlier note from Silvia Pfeiffer,
> [http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2009Jun/0667.html] she
> noted that:
>
>        "... it has been decided that the first version of HTML5 <video>
> (and <audio>) will not have an in-built solution for captions, audio
> annotations and the like, because it is possible to do such with
> javascript and external files."
>
> Really?  Who actually 'decided' this, as I for one would certainly not
> take that lying down.  Was the WAI PF consulted on this piece of decision
> making?  Or was it once again a back-room, IRC 'consensus' of a few?

I would have loved to have a spec for captions as part of the first
version of HTML5. However, in an email discussion on WHATWG, Ian came
to this conclusion:
http://lists.whatwg.org/htdig.cgi/whatwg-whatwg.org/2008-December/017966.html
.

 After some further discussion it seemed that the currently possible
solutions are:
* captions inside media files -> the media framework deals with them
and displays them if it can
* captions in a separate file -> use some javascript solution that you
hand-craft to solve this problem

Ian seems happy with these solutions for the moment, even if neither
exposes a standard interface toward dealing with captions from the Web
page level, i.e. they cannot be crawled and indexed by search engines,
or exposed to screen readers or other such instruments.

Ian also mentioned that standards are made by implementations and
since there are no browsers yet that implement caption support
natively, he has nothing to base his spec on other than wild
suggestions.

Several of us are working on some of these wild suggestions and I hope
for the second version of HTML5 we will have some implementations
available.

Regards,
Silvia.

Received on Friday, 3 July 2009 03:34:07 UTC