Re: Displaying multiple lines in WebVTT

On Tue, Apr 3, 2012 at 7:17 PM, Silvia Pfeiffer
<silviapfeiffer1@gmail.com>wrote:

> If I read the spec correctly, newline characters are just parsed as
> normal characters and rendered according to their meaning.
>

I should restate an earlier argument which trailed off without a
conclusion; I think this is a serious design mistake.

Newlines acting as line breaks is going to encourage people to wrap lines
by hand, which in most cases they shouldn't be doing.  Manual word-wrapping
is dependent on the particular font, font size, UA text renderer, and so on
in use.  Correct wrapping needs to be performed by the UA.  This is no
different from HTML--you don't manually wrap HTML by inserting manual line
breaks.

WebVTT text should mimic HTML (in its default whitespace mode): collapse
newlines to a space, and use a <br> marker to indicate explicit line breaks
when they're really wanted.  A "balanced" word-wrapping mode should also be
added, to wrap lines in with balanced line-lengths, which is the typical
wrapping method for captions.

-- 
Glenn Maynard