Re: Displaying multiple lines in WebVTT

On Fri, Apr 27, 2012 at 10:26 AM, Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch> wrote:

> Most people writing VTT captions are not familiar with SRT. Most people
> writing VTT captions haven't even been born yet.
>

(The implication seems to be that the existing knowledge and habits of
users today don't matter, since they'll all die and be replaced by new
users eventually anyway.  I think that's a bad argument; today's users do
matter.)

No timestamp tag. This isn't a transcript or karaoke file. It's just
> subtitles. They're not supposed to be faithful to the exact timing of the
> dialogue, or even necessarily the exact delivery. It is perfectly normal
> to show multiple (usually two) lines of dialogue in a single cue.
>

Of 106000 lines of captions (from SSA captions, because they're easier to
run quick statistics on, and I have a bigger sample of them), 475 match
[\.!]\\N ("." or "!" followed by an explicit line break).  It's more than
one in a thousand, but it's infrequent.

Showing two lines of dialogue simultaneously with different speakers is
very confusing.  When a block of captions appears, I read the whole thing
and associate it with the current speaker; if the bottom half of the
captions ends up being a different speaker, I have to mentally backtrack to
fix up the mess.

On Mon, Apr 30, 2012 at 4:03 AM, Philip Jägenstedt <philipj@opera.com>wrote:

> Using <br> has some short-term benefits, but I tend to think that actual
> newlines will make more sense in the long term for a strongly line-oriented
> format...


WebVTT is much more block-oriented than line-oriented.  For a line-oriented
captioning format, look at SSA.

On Mon, Apr 30, 2012 at 5:13 AM, Simon Pieters <simonp@opera.com> wrote:

> I think using <br> won't prevent people from using explicit line breaks in
> practice, so it's probably the wrong way to encourage authors to rely on
> automatic wrapping.
>

Preventing it isn't the goal; just to deter people from porting their SRT
habits over to WebVTT without realizing what they're doing.

It'd also be nice to be able to have inline comment blocks without having
to stuff them on the same line:

00:00:01.000 --> 00:00:03.000
<c comment>glenn: this needs editing<br></c>
<c comment>editor: looks good<br></c>
sentence

with a stylesheet setting "comment" to display: none, which is toggled on
and off during authoring.  This would currently result in blank lines when
comments are hidden.

-- 
Glenn Maynard