Re: metadata in the VTT file header, re-starting the conversation

On Feb 22, 2012, at 14:05 , Silvia Pfeiffer wrote:

> On Thu, Feb 23, 2012 at 8:53 AM, Ralph Giles <giles@mozilla.com> wrote:
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>> On 22/02/12 12:29 PM, David Singer wrote:
>> 
>>> well, I was dividing the world into cue and non-cue, and calling
>>> all the latter meta-data.  sorry if that confused…
>> 
>> Fair enough.
>> 
>> So it seems like we have two extension points. (1) We can put lines of
>> additional data between the WEBVTT filetype identification line and
>> the first double-newline. (2) we can define a more general extension
>> method like Ian's 'COMMENT -->' stanzas.
>> 
>> The first option seems uncontroversial, so I think we should just
>> agree on and implement a key-value syntax for it. Parsers, and even
>> the initial spec can easily skip this data.
>> 
>> The second is more difficult. Looking at the use cases, the real
>> advantage I see to have something beyond key-value lines is the
>> ability to embed something like css without having to reformat it. But
>> if I put the requirement like that, having to avoid the
>> caption-closing double-newline inside the content is problematic. So I
>> think if we do this we
>> need a real quoting mechanism, something like David's '[[ ... ]]'
>> proposal, but as a top-level parser token. And while that's not a
>> character sequence which appears in css, we probably also want an
>> escape mechanism in case someone does need to embed such a thing. As
>> such, that's a much more invasive change. Is that worthwhile just to
>> make multiline data attachments more readable?
> 
> Doesn't that essentially mean the introduction of a means of
> commenting out stuff?


true, from the point of view of finding cues, we could use the same syntax for multi-line comments and multi-line values.

e.g. 

comment=[[
I don't want this cue to appear
or the next line
]]

David Singer
Multimedia and Software Standards, Apple Inc.

Received on Wednesday, 22 February 2012 22:13:11 UTC