Re: Metadata in the VTT file header (bug 15851), use cases (and a need to close this)

On Sep 12, 2012, at 12:36 , Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch> wrote:

> On Wed, 12 Sep 2012, David Singer wrote:
>> 
>> You're assuming a browser embedding; we envisage VTT used in a whole 
>> bunch of scenarios and locations.
> 
> I think this may be the source of many of the disagreements we have.
> 
> Personally I think of WebVTT as part of HTML. It's a Web technology, 
> primarily for browsers. It's ok if it's used elsewhere, just like if it's 
> ok for CSS or JS to be used elsewhere, but all such uses are secondary to 
> the use in a browser, and where the goals conflict, the browser case 
> _always_ wins. This includes the issue of simplicity; if a feature is only 
> useful outside browsers and adding it makes the language more than 
> trivially more complicated, then we shouldn't add it.
> 
> Trying to design one technology for multiple use cases is how you end up 
> with bad technologies. I don't think we should do that. There are plenty 
> of existing subtitle formats for other spaces. There's no need for us to 
> warp WebVTT into a one-size-fits-all format.
> 
> We started with SRT, and we made a Web-optimised variant called WebSRT. It 
> was called _Web_SRT because it's for the Web. This remains the case. We 
> should not lose sight of this.

I am cool with that.  I don't think anything that's being suggested is particularly complex, and (well, until noticing --> became required) was explicitly and carefully designed to be ignored by existing parsers, and ignorable if wishes, and it should be clearly stated that the embedding environment (e.g. HTML) takes precedence if you don't ignore it.

Even in the case where final deployment is on the web, we identified at least one instance where keeping a file 'tagged' in workflows would be beneficial.



David Singer
Multimedia and Software Standards, Apple Inc.

Received on Wednesday, 12 September 2012 20:24:06 UTC