Re: Displaying multiple lines in WebVTT

On Thu, 26 Apr 2012, Glenn Maynard wrote:
> 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 do not believe that it will. Mere tutorial-level information will be 
sufficient for this kind of thing. That is, whatever mechanism people use 
to learn the language will be fine.


> > 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.

Your experiences have clearly been more positive than mine.


> > > 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 not one in a few thousand.


> 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.

We're talking about captions. Long captions so long that they won't fit 
on one line of an editor are exceedingly rare.


> > 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.

The specific example above is a single bitmap from a DVD caption track. 
(First hit on Google for that cue's text identifies the source correctly. 
It happened to be what I had playing -- with captions enabled, 
coincidentally -- when I replied to the earlier e-mail.)

I see no reason to suggest that authors should use two WebVTT cues for 
such a case. On the contrary, I think such cases are quite common.

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

Received on Thursday, 26 April 2012 22:54:32 UTC