Re: Timed tracks

On Fri, 7 May 2010, Philip Jägenstedt wrote:
> 
> (Hixie has participated very little in these discussions, so it's hard 
> to frame this as his creation alone.)

For the record, I have followed the very same strategy I have used for 
everything else in the spec: I have read, carefully and in detail, every 
e-mail ever sent on the subject to the mailing lists (p-h-a11y, p-h, and 
whatwg), I have publicly collected concrete use cases [1][2] and invited 
everyone to contribute their own [3][4], I have researched the vast number 
of options available to us, e.g. all the various timed track formats [5], 
again in public, and I have used all this information to try to come up 
with solutions that satisfy all the use cases without introducing 
unncessary complexity and without closing off future avenues for 
extensions, again with all of the proposals done in public [6]. These 
proposals are, as Philip says, based on the ideas in the aforementioned 
mailing list discussions, for example those documented in the bugs for 
which I am doing all this work in the first place [7][8], and those 
documented in task force polls [9].

The work is far from done; maybe WebSRT isn't a good solution, and then 
it'll be thrown out and something better used instead. However, the 
working group charter calls for me to make proposals in the form of spec 
text [10], and the working group process for issues with these proposals 
to be raised in bugs [11], and I intend to follow exactly this model, just 
as I have with everything else.

[1] http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/Use_cases_for_timed_tracks_rendered_over_video_by_the_UA
[2] http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/Use_cases_for_API-level_access_to_timed_tracks
[3] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2010Apr/1103.html
[4] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html-a11y/2010Apr/0189.html
[5] http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/Timed_track_formats
[6] http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/Timed_tracks
[7] http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=9452
[8] http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=9471
[9] http://www.w3.org/2002/09/wbs/44061/media-text-format/results
[10] http://www.w3.org/2007/03/HTML-WG-charter#decisions
[11] http://dev.w3.org/html5/decision-policy/decision-policy.html

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'