Re: TT and subtitling

>Similarly I am hoping that the style of the
>displayed text is defined by an optional mechanism (e.g. style sheets) and
>that the end presentation of the text is primarily the responsibility of the
>**viewer** implementation (and could be much different to the authors
>conception).

I think putting the burden of text-display characteristics on the viewer is an unfair
 one.  I am not against viewers overriding author choices, perhaps by using style
 sheets to control the style characteristics of the text, but I think it's incumbent on the
 author to provide captions or subtitles that convey information in a logical manner.
  ("Logical manner", of course, will differ from author to author and agency to
 agency, but that's another story....)  If viewers want to change the appearance of the
 captions (just as they can change the appearance of a Web page today), fine. 
 Otherwise authors might as well just provide a plain transcript and nothing more.

> I am hoping that the TT standard is **unlike** SMIL,
>RealPlayer, Quicktime. These existing standards IMHO already provide
>competent solutions where the **authors** intended presenation of the
>material is preserved totally through the transmission chain to the display
>surface.

I, too, am hoping for a format unlike RealText, QText and SAMI.  Yes, they provide
 competent solutions for the display of text, but they're incompatible with each other.
  It's a real pain creating three different caption/subtitle files for a single presentation.

Geoff Freed
WGBH/NCAM

Received on Wednesday, 5 February 2003 08:43:21 UTC