[Bug 15851] New: WebVTT: File-wide Metadata

https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=15851

           Summary: WebVTT: File-wide Metadata
           Product: TextTracks CG
           Version: unspecified
          Platform: PC
        OS/Version: All
            Status: NEW
          Severity: normal
          Priority: P2
         Component: WebVTT
        AssignedTo: ian@hixie.ch
        ReportedBy: silviapfeiffer1@gmail.com
         QAContact: dave.null@w3.org
                CC: mike@w3.org, public-texttracks@w3.org


For HTML-page independent use of WebVTT files the WebVTT parser [1] tolerates
[2] the introduction of metadata at the top of the WebVTT file after the
"WEBVTT" file identifier and the first cue, separated by a blank line.

Web browsers won't care what is in there and can ignore this header metadata.
But other applications will care, including the WebVTT encapsulation
specification for WebM as currently under development [3] and other players
that need the information that the <track> element has.

We therefore need to define the format of header metadata and which fields
should be used by default.

I propose we use the name-value approach to metadata with a "=" as a separator
and one name-value per line, e.g.
Version=V1_ABC
License=CC-BY-SA

Also, in analogy to what is happening with the <track> element in HTML, we
should encourage the three following standard metadata headers:
Language=en
Kind=Captions
Label=English captions

Any further metadata header schemes can be created by other organisations based
on this (e.g. Dublin Core).

In summary:
I would suggest to introduce into the spec a normative note about the format of
header metadata fields and an informative note about the recommended core
metadata headers Language, Kind and Label.

[1] http://dev.w3.org/html5/webvtt/#webvtt-parser
[2] by virtue of parsing step 15
[3]
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-tVXd1mRlWNvZrdIkLAJEp5xt3gDVDwfVubyUm9oNJ4/edit?hl=en_US

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Received on Thursday, 2 February 2012 04:36:09 UTC