[whatwg] Captions, Subtitles and the Video Element

[Dan Brickley]

On 17/7/09 15:04, Tab Atkins Jr. wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 17, 2009 at 4:15 AM, Ian Hickson<ian at hixie.ch>  wrote:
>> 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.
>
> I don't remember the exact scene you're referring to, but it's also
> possible that those subtitles are then an integral part of the
> content, and should properly be baked into the movie.

Yep, slippery slope. If we're not careful we'll end up requiring a 3d 
file browsing facility, so that Jurassic Park can be properly 
"represented" - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fsn

cheers,

Dan