[Bug 28427] New: Other line wrapping strategies should be permitted

https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=28427

            Bug ID: 28427
           Summary: Other line wrapping strategies should be permitted
           Product: TextTracks CG
           Version: unspecified
          Hardware: PC
               URL: http://www.w3.org/TR/webvtt1/
                OS: All
            Status: NEW
          Severity: normal
          Priority: P2
         Component: WebVTT
          Assignee: dave.null@w3.org
          Reporter: nigel.megitt@bbc.co.uk
        QA Contact: public-texttracks@w3.org
                CC: philipj@opera.com, silviapfeiffer1@gmail.com

In §6.2: "Regardless of the value of the 'white-space' property, any line
breaks inserted by the user agent for the purposes of line wrapping must be
placed so as to minimize Δ across each run of consecutive lines between
preserved newlines in the source. Δ for a set of lines is defined as the sum
over each line of the absolute of the difference between the line's length and
the mean line length of the set."

This specifies a single line wrapping strategy, but not one that is appropriate
for all usages even in horizontal scripts. Specifically, it is common authorial
practice to use grammatical analysis to achieve a better reading experience
even at the expense of balanced length lines. Usually this is done by a human,
I believe, but implementations should be permitted to attempt it too.

In §1.1: "In general, therefore, authors are encouraged to write cues all on
one line except when a line break is definitely necessary, and to not manually
line-wrap for aesthetic reasons alone."

I would resolve this by 

1) permitting other line wrapping strategies explicitly in §6.2, i.e. making
the above clause optional and possibly parameterised, and 
2) by amending the encouragement in §1.1. It is unclear what is meant by the
words "aesthetic reasons alone" here. A possible alternate wording is: "In
general authors are encouraged either to insert line breaks explicitly or to
write all cues on a single line, and authors are reminded that even if line
breaks are inserted explicitly, additional line breaks could be inserted to
attempt to render all of the text, depending on space available, amount of text
and font size."

-- 
You are receiving this mail because:
You are the QA Contact for the bug.

Received on Tuesday, 7 April 2015 12:44:01 UTC