Re: WebVTT bidi: should a cue be allowed to contain more than one paragraph?

On Wed, Dec 7, 2011 at 5:07 PM, Simon Pieters <simonp@opera.com> wrote:

> work. However, the HTML spec says that only one track of kind captions
>> or subtitles can be showing at any point in time
>>
>> http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/video.html#sourcing-out-of-band-text-tracks
>>
> From the point of view of authoring that information, two WebVTT files
>
> Where does the spec say this? As far as I can tell the spec allows several
> tracks to be showing at the same time if the user so wishes. However,
> there's no declarative way for the author to give two tracks "showing by
> default", which is something we might want to change.


This would become complex.  For example, you might have multiple pairs:
EN+AR and JA+AR.  Specifying multiple defaults only lets you connect one of
these pairs; if you set the default to EN and AR, and the user's preferred
language is JA, it would need a way to know that the AR track should be
enabled when the JA track is.

Inline language tagging (discussed at length elsewhere) is much simpler,
eg. <lang ar>...</lang>, which would translate to <span lang=ar>...</span>.

That said,

On Wed, Dec 7, 2011 at 8:20 AM, Aharon (Vladimir) Lanin
<aharon@google.com>wrote:

> 3. I believe that there are use cases that require allowing a cue to
> contain more than one (bidi) paragraph. For example, there at least used
> to be a widespread practice in Israel for Hebrew-language films to come
> with subtitles that gave the dialogue in both the original Hebrew and in
> English translation, simultaneously on separate lines.
>

It sounds like you're describing very old legacy practice, possibly
originating from media without dynamic captioning, like VHS.  When you can
switch the language at runtime, which everything since DVD has been able to
do, it's hard to think of a reason to do this.

If users do want to see two separate subtitle languages at once, UIs can
expose that on their own.  There's no need to express the legacy pairings
in metadata, or (worse) to bake it into the subtitle data.

-- 
Glenn Maynard