Re: WebVTT feedback

On Fri, Dec 9, 2011 at 7:45 AM, Philip Jägenstedt <philipj@opera.com> wrote:

>  Firefox apparently defaults to Japanese for UTF-8 CJK when the language
>> isn't specified.  It doesn't do any complex heuristics, and it doesn't
>> depend on the user's locale.  This seems like the optimal solution--no
>> heuristics (making it more predictable for users), and has none of the
>> locale-specific behavior that plague charsets.
>>
>
> That doesn't sound very good at all for unlabeled simplified or
> traditional Chinese.


If you mean "for existing content without @lang", then that's what I
thought, too.  I had assumed that legacy content would prevent browsers
from doing this, since IE uses the locale by default.

But since Firefox has been getting away with this for a long time, it's
worth investigating why this is working out for them.  If other browsers
can follow suit, then it's the ideal solution: it's simple, consistent, and
encourages the use of @lang where the default isn't what people want.

 I'm not aware of any locale specific stuff here, but I think that the
> character encoding plays into this somehow, such that content served as GBK
> or Big5 is more likely to be considered to be simplified and traditional
> Chinese respectively.


Right, most browsers do that.  I'm only looking at UTF-8 content here,
where there's no language hint implicit in the encoding.

-- 
Glenn Maynard