Re: Displaying multiple lines in WebVTT

On Wed, 25 Apr 2012, Glenn Maynard wrote:
> 
> I've explained the problem.  Again, it will cause most ex-SRT users to 
> mistakenly manually wrap lines, which will result in a much higher 
> percentage of low-quality, hard-wrapped content that will fall apart if 
> the user selects a larger font size.

I do not think the majority of future WebVTT authors are going to be SRT 
users. That would be like optimising HTML for SGML users.


> People are never going to understand that wrapping in VTT should be left 
> to the renderer, and not done by hand like in SRT, unless this is fixed.

I do not understand how you come to such a conclusion. On the contrary, I 
find that the Web authoring community has done a remarkable job of 
disseminating exactly this kind of information.

I also disagree that there's any particular reason to believe that people 
will be less likely to use <br> incorrectly than real line breaks. 
Certainly Web authors seem quite happy to use <br> incorrectly in Web 
markup often enough.


> With explicit line breaks, it'll be much more obvious to people that 
> wrapping works like HTML and not like text/plain.

With explicit line breaks, it'll be much uglier.

It's pretty obvious that line wrapping happens, you'll notice it as soon 
as you write a long line, which is likely to happen pretty early on.

This is especially true for Web formats, where differing line lengths will 
be widely seen.


> It's fairly uncommon to actually want a line break inside a caption, so 
> the cost to users of having to say <br> is trivially small.

I disagree with this premise. Lots of subtitles consist of dialogue of the 
form:

   - You ready, Corporal?
   - Yes, ma'am.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Thursday, 26 April 2012 03:30:13 UTC