RE: Change proposals for issue-152

Philip: "Having one caption jump around because another becomes visible or is  hidden would be rather annoying, don't you think? As far as I can tell,  the example you provided would suffer from this problem."

-- right, as I said I think the 80%+ use case is a fixed rectangle in a fixed place, and probably the majority of the remaining cases a fixed size rectangle in a flow layout, I only offered the example to show it could be done, not that it was an example of best practice; I will note that rollup captioning is "captions jumping around" so there is something of a precedent, although that would be for a single source. 

Philip: "I somewhat agree with this. To the fullest extent possible, we should  reuse CSS. However, I'm not convinced that it's actually possible in this  case, given that CSS is stateless and can have no memory of captions that  are no longer showing."

I think you need to distinguish between using style to position the area where the captions will appear, and the style applied to the cues themselves within that area. I'm really only talking about the first case here, The style applied to position the rendering area for the cues does not need to know the state. The state is only required in the second case and that is down to the rules for rendering the captions within the given rectangle, and avoiding overlap there is pretty much orthogonal to this discussion. 

I don’t think there is a lot of merit in designing a complicated layout system that combines two or more caption sources into a single display, as that seems like an edge case to me. In cases where it was actually necessary the author could use getCuesAsHTML and combine the contents manually.

Received on Tuesday, 22 March 2011 20:47:44 UTC