Re: Displaying multiple lines in WebVTT

On Wed, Apr 25, 2012 at 10:29 PM, Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch> wrote:

>  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.
>

If it's going to take evangelism to correct this problem, then it's much
better to avoid it to begin with.

 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.
>

It's rare in my experience to see paragraphs manually word-wrapped with
<br>s on the Web; people generally understand that in HTML, word-wrapping
is done by the browser and not by the author.

 > 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.
>

The one in a few thousand captions that need an explicit line break for
some reason will have a <br>.  That's not ugly.

It's also an improvement to the format by itself; it's convenient to break
longer captions in text editors, and it makes accidental line breaks less
likely.

 > 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.
>

These are two one-line captions, not one two-line caption.

-- 
Glenn Maynard