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

On Wed, Apr 11, 2012 at 12:06 PM, Glenn Maynard <glenn@zewt.org> wrote:
> 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.)


What do others think? Should we introduce an explicit line break
character such as <br> and ignore any CR and LF characters inside the
cue?



>> 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.

I wonder if we could add a new value to the word-wrap property in CSS.
Ian's input would be good here, indeed.

Cheers,
Silvia.

Received on Wednesday, 11 April 2012 22:53:00 UTC