Re: Displaying multiple lines in WebVTT

On Wed, Apr 4, 2012 at 11:24 AM, Glenn Maynard <glenn@zewt.org> wrote:
> 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.

I understand where you're coming from and some part of me agrees that
line breaks should be left to the browser.

However, there are rules on what quality captions should look like and
how lines should be broken, see
http://www.dcmp.org/captioningkey/text.html the line division section.
That would not be possible unless you allow explicit lines breaks and
make it easy to author them. I believe that is the reason why most
captioning formats work with explicit line breaks.

We have automated line wrapping for long lines. However, "long" is
only defined as hitting the edge of the video element. If you have a
better suggestion for when line breaking should kick in, I think that
might be a good idea.


> 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.

There would be too many <br>s since all captions are usually
hand-crafted. When the video is increased in size, the captions are
scaled up in font-size, so that works out.


>  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.

How do you suggest that should look?

Cheers,
Silvia.

Received on Thursday, 5 April 2012 08:45:46 UTC