Re: Roll-up captions in WebVTT

On Tue, Nov 29, 2011 at 10:23 AM, Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch> wrote:
> On Fri, 25 Nov 2011, Silvia Pfeiffer wrote:
>>
>> BTW: in case you don't understand what I am trying to achieve here, try
>> out this video on YouTube and select the caption track "English -
>> rollup" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xTURXWoJ6A
>
> That's like ten times more annoying to read than the normal captions on
> that video. I think if we are to support roll-up captions we need a far
> more convincing use case.

The fact is that roll-up captions are a standard means in which TV
captions have been provided in the past and that publishers want these
replicated in exactly the same way on the Web. This is why YouTube had
to develop this feature, too. Since we are making WebVTT a universal
format in which all existing captioning from TV can be represented on
the Web, too, we have to support this case.

Captions are a legal part of a video - if you want to present a video
on the Web identically to how it has been authored, we need this
support, otherwise it's not the same artistic object and sites run
into copyright issues. It doesn't matter if what is presented is
aesthetically more pleasing than an alternative presentation - we
don't change the content of a movie for display on the Web either just
because we don't think a part of it is not aesthetically pleasing.

Cheers,
Silvia.

Received on Monday, 28 November 2011 23:38:48 UTC