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

Hi John,

On Thu, Jun 13, 2013 at 1:30 AM, John Birch <John.Birch@screensystems.tv> wrote:
> 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.

It is indeed sad that there is so much misinformation about VTT out
there and so much prejudice. Hopefully I can help to clarify some
aspects here.


> 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?

Be honest to yourself: how much further is TTML? It doesn't have a
rendering algorithm yet, it doesn't have a JavaScript API that
browsers would need to implement it properly (so application
developers can manipulate the format), it still has bugs that prevent
interoperable implementations in details. WebVTT even has a validator:
http://quuz.org/webvtt/.

Please don't get me wrong: I'm not trying to attack TTML - HTML is
another example of a format that continues to change. I'm just trying
to put this statement into perspective. All formats always evolve to
support more features. Bugs continue to be found and fixed. That
doesn't mean that the format is a "half-finished strawman", which,
incidentally, is rather derogatory language and doesn't sound very
welcoming to anyone trying to work with WebVTT .


> (Especially when there are other open public standards that may be more advanced in progress and may have followed a more conventional route?)

The route in which standards are created has nothing to do with the
quality of the outcome. Many de-facto standards and industry standards
were created over the years that are of high quality, and many
specifications that "real standards bodies" following "real
standardisation processes" have created have come out bloated and
unusable and were never implemented.


> 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).

You may have missed that there is an actual spec for this:
https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/text-tracks/raw-file/default/608toVTT/608toVTT.html
Other conversions are planned, but have not been required yet.


> 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.

If this statements implies that professional captioning and subtitling
organisations are ignoring WebVTT, then you may have overlooked that
some are already supporting it and others are keeping a close eye.
They don't seem to be making a big fuss about it though. For example:

http://www.cpcweb.com/webcasts/webcast_samples.htm#WebVTT
http://www.automaticsync.com/captionsync/captionsync-delivers-webvtt-output/
http://www.synchrimedia.com/
http://www.longtailvideo.com/support/jw-player/29360/basic-vtt-captions/
http://www.wowza.com/forums/content.php?498-How-to-stream-WebVTT-subtitles-to-iOS-for-closed-captioning


> 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.


Agreed (though I don't know what you mean by "indirectly expressing
author's intent"). WebVTT as it is specified does all these things,
minus bugs.

Hope this clarifies some of the misunderstandings that this group has
with WebVTT.

Best Regards,
Silvia.



> 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 Friday, 14 June 2013 10:14:22 UTC