Re: Handling live translation of cues to WebVTT

On Fri, 2014-01-24 at 23:33 +0700, Philip Jägenstedt wrote:


Having looked at the original thread, I can only guess that you don't
want to involve scripts, since if you can rely on scripts it seems
like you could easily do what you're asking for. What is the reason
that you do not want to use scripts here?


First, a philosophical reason: Requiring JavaScript to play a live video with captions seems like a huge hack. Technically, we could decode videos in JavaScript too, but that doesn't mean it's a good solution.

Second, a practical reason: If we can produce a valid WebVTT document, then any web page can display it with a normal video tag. If we have to use JavaScript, then inevitably there will be several different ways of doing it, and any page that wants to use live captions from outside sources will need a list of JavaScript hacks to make them all work. Then, anytime a site that produces live captions changes its method, anything that depends on it will break until they update their JavaScript.. It just seems like "live video" is a normal enough case we shouldn't push all of this complexity on every site that plays them.