[Bug 28255] [webvtt] no provision for indicating overall content language(s) [I18N-ISSUE-420]

https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=28255

--- Comment #17 from Addison Phillips <addison@lab126.com> ---
I agree with Martin's comment #15.

(In reply to Simon Pieters from comment #16)
> It seems to me there are two bugs here:
> 
> 1. It is not specified that an external language definition actually affects
> the language of the cue text.

Affects is probably the wrong word. Indicates is probably a better choice. 

Probably the best you can do here is allow an external language definition to
indicate the language of text (including the cue text) in the file, in the
absence of local-to-the-file information.

> 
> 2. Missing internal file-wide language declaration.

That would be the initial intention of this issue. 

In particular, WebVTT currently allows only for span-based override of some
unspecified base language. That requires every bit of text to be wrapped in a
cue language span if the language information is important to the processing or
rendering. This is not very efficient (especially since most files will likely
contain only a single language). 

For example, a cue file containing Chinese might need to be tagged with a
language tag of "zh-Hans" or "zh-CN" so that a Simplified Chinese font will be
applied by the font fallback system rather than defaulting to an inappropriate
Japanese font on certain systems (producing a ransom note effect).

A couple of nits from reading your current editor's copy:

In http://dev.w3.org/html5/webvtt/#webvtt-cue-text-parsing-rules you should say
"language tag", not "language code".

In http://dev.w3.org/html5/webvtt/#webvtt-cue-text you still say the cue
language span "must be a valid BCP 47 language tag", where 'valid' has a
particular meaning in BCP 47 and it is not clear if you intend that specific
meaning. You should: (a) omit the word valid; (b) clarify that you mean BCP 47
valid; or (c) use the word 'well-formed' instead. (Valid in BCP 47 means that
the implementation checks to see that all of the subtags are registered, at
least as of an implementation specific date)

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Received on Sunday, 4 October 2015 21:21:42 UTC