RE: A new proposal for how to deal with text track cues

Hmmm... I don't know where to start with this one. The following comments may seem harsh, but they do reflect my **personal** perspective of WebVTT.

Email threads can only go so far... and promoting a half-finished strawman as a standard and inviting people to comment / fix it does not seem to be an efficient route to a clear and effective standard either?
(Especially when there are other open public standards that may be more advanced in progress and may have followed a more conventional route?)

RE: lack an evident appreciation of current captioning /subtitling workflows and conventions.
There seems to be no cognisance of the wider community of captioning / subtitling... no sense of how WebVTT content might be created by conversion from other formats (like 608/708, or from Teletext etc).
There does not seem to be a huge awareness of the role of a professional captioner or subtitler. Or of the role of commercial subtitling and captioning organisations, or of the existence of (internal) quality standards for caption / subtitling services that are adopted (insisted upon) by those organisations.
The professional captioning and subtitling profession is largely ignorant of WebVTT.

IMHO to be adoptable by the commercial / professional community:

WebVTT (as a standard) needs to:
        clearly and directly express the professional author's intent (not indirectly).
        support current conventions (positioning, style, timing).
        result in implementations that allow content to be identically displayed regardless of which implementation is rendering it.

Best regards,
John

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P Before printing, think about the environment-----Original Message-----
From: Silvia Pfeiffer [mailto:silviapfeiffer1@gmail.com]
Sent: 12 June 2013 14:06
To: John Birch
Cc: Glenn Adams; public-tt
Subject: Re: A new proposal for how to deal with text track cues

On Wed, Jun 12, 2013 at 10:50 PM, John Birch <John.Birch@screensystems.tv> wrote:
> I'm not personally over concerned with where or who does this kind of
> work, but am far more concerned with how it is done.
>
>
>
> For me, a process that involves substantial requirements analysis
> performed with the involvement of all potentially interested parties
> seems far more likely to result in a workable specification.

Agreed. That's what the email threads are after.


> If WebVTT is targeted at commercial use cases, it does IMHO seem to
> lack an evident appreciation of current captioning /subtitling
> workflows and conventions.

Please explain. What workflows and conventions does WebVTT break?

Best Regards,
Silvia.

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Received on Wednesday, 12 June 2013 15:31:02 UTC