[whatwg] Captions, Subtitles and the Video Element

Ian Hickson ian at hixie.ch
Fri Jul 17 02:15:44 PDT 2009


On Thu, 16 Jul 2009, Jeff Walden wrote:
> > 
> > (For the few authors who really want to go crazy, they can already 
> > overlap HTML onto their<video> and do whatever crazy stuff they want 
> > to do.)
> 
> By way of a use case for at least color and positioning, there's a 
> certain part of the third (?) Austin Powers movie wherein the color and 
> position of foreign-language subtitles plays an important part in the 
> artistic merits (lack thereof, arguably) of the scene.  How would you 
> suggest a movie-viewing site use <video> to display these?  It seems 
> unreasonable to say that the site must include special-case handling for 
> this particular movie clip's subtitles; it's more likely they would be 
> mangled in some manner and the semantic content (lack thereof) would be 
> lost.
> 
> By the way, I have no idea how foreign-language translations of the 
> movie handle this scene.  It's possible they simply subtitle the 
> subtitles and avoid the more complicated problems this scene arguably 
> presents.

I think this particular case can be a victim of the 80% rule.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'


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