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

(I'm not familiar with YAML, but on first glance it looks complex...)

On Fri, Apr 20, 2012 at 12:01 AM, David Singer <singer@apple.com> wrote:

> On Apr 20, 2012, at 13:09 , Glenn Maynard wrote:
> > (Still, it's ugly that embedding a stylesheet would end up looking messy
> in a plain text editor.  You don't really want to flatten a whole
> stylesheet into one line.  We should be able to find an approach with none
> of the negatives: clean in plain text, round-trips all text, while
> remaining simple…)
>
> Yes, I think we want some readability.  And maybe assuming all values
> could be on one line is bad.
>

(I agree with the first, but the second isn't a problem: any JSON document
can be stored on one line.)


A terminator-and-escape syntax ensures exact recovery of the original
> input, whereas with 822 one cannot tell the difference between lines that
> originally started with a blank, and lines that had one added for 822
> compatibility.
>

If you specify that continuation lines always have *exactly* one U+0020
space character added (instead of one or more of any whitespace, as in
822), then you can tell the difference: you just remove the one space.
That's how patch files work.

Key: value
 value
  value2

would decode to "value\nvalue\n value".

 ouch. that's fragile; lines that appear to be empty but actually consist
> of a single white-space. We're laying ourselves open to endless
> misunderstanding if blank lines 'appear' OK but actually need to have an
> invisible space character in them.
>

You can avoid this problem by treating lines containing only whitespace as
if they're empty (which I'm guessing--haven't checked--is probably what
WebVTT already does for its existing significant-blank-lines, for exactly
this reason).


On Fri, Apr 20, 2012 at 2:10 AM, Silvia Pfeiffer
<silviapfeiffer1@gmail.com>wrote:

> How about the "|" sign as the single value of a metadata field says
> that from there on the next lines are a multi-line value. Then we can
> end it with a single line that just has a "." on it (like SMTP bodys)
> (or again a "|" if you prefer). I think that could work out quite
> readable.
>
> For example:
>
> Kind:  captions
> Initial-Timestamp: 1000
> Style: |
> p {
>  font-size: 100px;
> }
> .class {
>  text-color: red;
> }
> .
> NexField: whatever
>

I haven't spent much time thinking about this yet, but I see two benefits
at first glance: you can paste in CSS from another file without having to
add a space to each line, and you don't have to fold the first line onto
the Header: line (which is a bit ugly).  I assume that blank lines would
still be disallowed (so parsers uninterested in headers can skip over them
trivially)?

-- 
Glenn Maynard