Re: WebVTT feedback

Got it.

yes, I would like it if you get the same (probably wrong) effect if you under-tag your language, no matter which UA with what settings you use.  The 'looks right to me' problem has burnt us in many places in the web, in the past (notably accessibility provisions, which the majority of web authors and testers don't see or check).

On Dec 21, 2011, at 17:50 , Glenn Maynard wrote:

> On Wed, Dec 21, 2011 at 8:08 PM, David Singer <singer@apple.com> wrote:
> I'm not sure I follow all this, but I don't see the problem with saying "if you want your text to look right, use the right Unicode characters and tag with the right languages, if necessary at the <span> level".
> 
> Saying that the results of including say Chinese characters in a span labelled as in say, Klingon, may result in unexpected, unpredictable, behavior, up to and including angry Klingons invading your workspace, seems to be not too bad, IMHO.  You want to be safe from said Klingons?  Label your languages!
> 
> This misses the real-world problems it causes.
> 
> When CJK characters are unlabelled or marked as non-CJK, current browser behavior--in IE and Firefox, at least--depends on the user's language.
> 
> This means that if you don't tag your language (or tag it incorrectly), it'll look right to you, the author.  It'll also look right to lots of your viewers; if your page is Japanese, there's a good chance that most of your viewers are on Japanese systems.  But as soon as someone in a different locale views your page, this is no longer the case, and a lot of authors will never notice this since most people don't test their page in lots of different locales (and shouldn't be expected to).
> 
> It's the same problem that charsets have: if you don't set a charset, browsers choose a default that depends on the user's locale, leading to pages that render fine for you and many of your users, but which break for people in different locales.
> 
> This is exactly the sort of interop failure that the web platform tries hard to prevent.
> 
> 
> (As a side note, the charset problem is definitely more serious, since it tends to result in badly broken pages instead of wrong glyph selection.  The pattern of the problem, however, is exactly the same: locale dependencies causing the creation of locale-dependent content.)
> 
> -- 
> Glenn Maynard
> 
> 

David Singer
Multimedia and Software Standards, Apple Inc.