Re: The need of newlines in WebVTT (was Re: Displaying multiple lines in WebVTT)

On Wed, Apr 11, 2012 at 8:11 AM, Glenn Maynard <glenn@zewt.org> wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 9, 2012 at 11:03 PM, Silvia Pfeiffer <silviapfeiffer1@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> If a user instead prefers to have the browser do the line breaks, they
>> can always remove the newlines when they are converting from existing
>> content to WebVTT and specify a "size" one the cues to determine at
>> which width the line break should occur.
>
>
> This isn't something that users should have to enable.

Sorry, I meant author, not user here.

I am mostly concerned with what the publisher is trying to get onto
screen. What the user does with it then, including changes of font,
fontsize, color etc is up to them. The author can only do this much to
get the best quality captions to users.


>> Here are some of the rules it states:
>> * Do not break a modifier from the word it modifies.
>> * Do not break a prepositional phrase.
>> * Do not break a person’s name nor a title from the name with which it
>> is associated.
>> * Do not break a line after a conjunction.
>> * Do not break an auxiliary verb from the word it modifies.
>
>
> These are exactly the sorts of things &nbsp; is for.  If you want to
> carefully edit subtitles to follow these rules, then that just means using
> it appropriately.  That's much saner than baking word wrapping into the
> file.
>
> (I've suggested supporting &nbsp; before--having to insert literal U+00A0
> NO-BREAK SPACE into documents is essentially impossible to edit, without a
> specialized editor, so I'll just reiterate that with the addition of the
> above use cases.)

I suggest filing a bug. I support it given these use cases.


>> * Never end a sentence and begin a new sentence on the same line
>> unless they are short, related sentences containing one or two words.
>
>
> <br> is fine here.
>
>> That - in my mind - is,
>> however, a different issue to whether we introduce explicit markup for
>> line breaks or not. I don't think we need the extra markup. I do think
>> though that we need the extra line balancing algorithm.
>
>
> A good balancing word-wrapping mode is a prerequisite for telling people
> that they shouldn't break lines by hand.  I do agree that it seems
> important, even on its own.

Let's definitely get the better word-wrapping algorithm for captions.
Is this something we have to do in CSS? How would we go about setting
this wrapping-mode?

Cheers,
Silvia.

Received on Wednesday, 11 April 2012 01:38:59 UTC