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

On Mon, Dec 12, 2011 at 12:59 AM, Silvia Pfeiffer <silviapfeiffer1@gmail.com
> wrote:

> I suppose that the way in which the spec is currently written only
> requires during loading of the text tracks that only a single track is
> "showing". There is no statement about what happens when the user
> activates a different track of the same kind. In particular it doesn't
> say that when a track is newly "showing" that every other one that was
> previously "showing" should now be hidden. However, I am pretty sure
> that that was the intention.
>

I don't see anything in the spec suggesting this.  It would be
unnecessarily limiting.

It's definitely necessary that we resolve this inconsistency: either
> several tracks of the same kind should be able to be "showing by
> default" just as currently it's possible to have several tracks be
> "showing"... or we should state that as soon as a track is newly
> "showing", no other track of the same kind is allowed to be in the
> same state.
>

Markup doesn't need to represent every possible state.  Is there a reason
to want to mark multiple tracks as enabled by default?

I think there is at least for metadata.  You may have separate, unrelated
metadata tracks for the same video, driving unrelated scripts.

My preference is actually on the latter. If anyone wants more than one
> track *of the same kind*  to be "showing" at the same time,


It's perfectly reasonable to allow showing subtitles in two languages
simultaneously, or two separate tracks in a single language, eg. Japanese
in both kanji and transliterated forms.  (People seem to like doing this
for songs.)

I recommend they use metadata kind tracks.
>

Unless it's actually a metadata track, this would be intentionally
mislabelling the track.  Anything that encourages people to do that should
be avoided.

Also, metadata tracks aren't rendered, so this wouldn't work, even as a
hacky workaround.

-- 
Glenn Maynard