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

On Tue, Apr 10, 2012 at 8:38 PM, Silvia Pfeiffer
<silviapfeiffer1@gmail.com>wrote:

> Sorry, I meant author, not user here.
>

A file-wide toggle to switch whether \n implies <br>?  That sounds
unpleasant, but that said, you could probably do this without any special
features.  Just apply the "white-space: pre" CSS style to all captions.
(That would require a way to insert inline CSS, but it looks like that's
wanted anyway.)

We'd need to make sure that this is actually supported (presumably,
standalone implementations of WebVTT won't support everything in CSS), and
that it works properly (eg. doesn't result in an extra newline at the end
of every caption, or similar artifacts).

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.
>

My concern is that it's WebVTT's responsibility to 1: make sure that any
well-authored content is font-size-agnostic, and 2: within reason, to
encourage authors to create well-authored content.  I believe the \n-based
wrapping scheme will fail catastrophically at #2, by leading people to
believe that authors are supposed to hand-wrap content, like SRT.  The
result will be a strong majority of content being hand-wrapped like SRT.
(I could be wrong about this prediction, but I'd be shocked.)

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

https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=16693


> 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?
>

I don't know anything about CSS except as a user.  This is a question for
Ian, I think.

-- 
Glenn Maynard