[whatwg] Remove addCueRange/removeCueRanges

[Ian Hickson]

On Thu, 13 Aug 2009, Philip Jägenstedt wrote:
> 
> We would like to request that addCueRange/removeCueRanges be dropped 
> from the spec before going into Last Call. We are not satisfied with it 
> and want to see it replaced with a solution that includes (scriptless) 
> timed text (a.k.a captions/subtitles). I don't think that this will be 
> finished in time for Last Call however, because we need implementor 
> experience to write a good spec. However, we have no intention of 
> implementing both cue ranges and its replacement, so it is better if the 
> spec doesn't provide any solution for now.
> 
> I have been briefly in contact with other browser vendors and while I 
> cannot speak for them here, I hope those that agree will chime in if 
> necessary.

I've commented out the cue range feature.


On Thu, 13 Aug 2009, Dr. Markus Walther wrote:
> 
> please note that with cue ranges removed, the last HTML 5 method to 
> perform audio subinterval selection is gone.
> 
> AFAIK, when dropping support for 'start' and 'end' attributes it was 
> noted on this list that cue ranges would provide a replacement to 
> dynamically select, say, a 3-second range from a 1-hour audio source.
> 
> So, if cue ranges will indeed be dropped, could browser vendors and 
> standards people consider putting 'start' and 'end' back in, just like 
> Safari had it for a while (albeit buggy)?
> 
> Actually, out of curiousity: could gapless concatenation of several 
> audio objects be added as well, e.g.
> 
> audioObject1.append(audioObject2)
> 
> or even
> 
> audioObject.join([audioObject1,audioObject2,...,audioObjectN)
> 
> Just my 2c.

There's not going to be a way to do subrange selection in this version of 
the API. It'll be one of the first things to come back, I expect.


As was pointed out, there are many notes in the spec source of things to 
bring to the "next version" of the spec. If anyone wants to maintain an 
off-spec copy of these annotations, please feel free to do so.


On Fri, 14 Aug 2009, Silvia Pfeiffer wrote:
> 
> I am actually hoping that we could attach callbacks to time-aligned text 
> segments which makes the whole approach to cue ranges more generic. 
> Hopefully I will have a demo of this within the next few weeks, so we 
> can discuss further.

I don't really think we want to tie callbacks of this nature to text -- in 
fact, the two are likely to be almost mutally exclusive features: you 
would need callbacks when you're not using timed text solutions, so that 
you can do your own. Another example would be keeping a slide show in sync 
with an audio track, where each slide has a cue range -- this has nothing 
to do with text tracks, and you wouldn't want to have to generate a fake 
text track file just to get the hooks to do this when all your data about 
slide timings is in script already.

-- 
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