comments on proposed timed text charter

I sent the following comments on
http://www.w3.org/2013/05/timed-text-charter.html to a member-only
list, which I resend here (without the quoted material starting the
message):

I talked with a bunch of Mozilla folks about this, and we don't
want to have WebVTT and TTML in one group.

TTML doesn't make sense as something to be implemented in Web
browsers, because:
 * TTML has substantial unneeded complexity, such as bringing in
   XSL-FO and large numbers of XML namespaces, and significant
   unneeded complexity in its own captioning semantics.
 * WebVTT has much more traction in this space (implemented in
   IE10, Chrome 26, Safari 6, and Opera 12 per [1] and in-progress
   implementation in Firefox [2]).
Thus we think we're better off with a single format here.  We don't
want to add unnecessary complexity to what Web browsers support,
since adding things to the set of what browsers support is a
decision to permanently increase the complexity of software that
handles Web content (including all Web browsers).

We'd prefer to continue developing WebVTT in a group that is working
only on WebVTT (such as the current community group, or a new
working group); we're not interested in the extra overhead of
participating in a group that's working on both WebVTT and TTML.

-David

[1] http://www.longtailvideo.com/html5/track/
[2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=629350

-- 
𝄞   L. David Baron                         http://dbaron.org/   𝄂
𝄢   Mozilla                           http://www.mozilla.org/   𝄂

Received on Monday, 20 May 2013 09:48:52 UTC