Re: meta-data in the VTT file header, a strawman proposal

On Thu, Apr 19, 2012 at 3:29 AM, David Singer <singer@apple.com> wrote:

> it makes style-sheets readable, and aren't line-breaks significant in
> style-sheets?
>
> And we don't *want* actual empty lines, as simple parsers will think the
> cue-text is coming next.
>

I guess it's worth throwing out there: it could use JSON, with the added
restriction that newlines are not allowed as part of whitespace between
tokens.  For example:

Kind: "captions"
Initial-Timestamp: 1000
Style: "p { font-size: 100px; }\n.class { text-color: red; }"

This has a couple advantages: values are typed, complex types can be
represented (if there's any call for that; there may not be), and it
handles things like newlines for us without needing to actually store them
directly.  It's easy to parse: each entry is a single line, and everyone
already has a JSON parser for the rest of the work.

The main disadvantage is that, for multiline blocks, it's cosmetically
ugly.  If you're editing with an editor, then this is no problem, though:
it would decode the string and display it as multiline.

(I could probably think up a workaround for this to allow newlines even
though JSON doesn't, but that might negate the benefits, since then you
couldn't read a whole header simply by reading a single line.)

-- 
Glenn Maynard