[whatwg] Fwd: Discussing WebSRT and alternatives/improvements

[Eric Carlson]

On Aug 25, 2010, at 8:40 AM, Silvia Pfeiffer wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 26, 2010 at 12:39 AM, Philip Jägenstedt <philipj at opera.com> wrote:
>  
> The results are hardly consistent, but at least one player exist for which it's not enough to change the file extension and add a header. If we want to make sure that no content is treated as SRT by any application, the format must be more incompatible.
> 
> You misunderstand my intent. I am by no means suggesting that no WebSRT content is treated as SRT by any application. All I am asking for is a different file extension and a different mime type and possibly a magic identifier such that *authoring* applications (and authors) can clearly designate this to be a different format, in particular if they include new features. Then a *playback application* has the chance to identify them as a different format and provide a specific parser for it, instead of failing like Totem. They can also decide to extend their existing SRT parser to support both WebSRT and SRT. And I also have no issue with a user deciding to give a WebSRT file a go by renaming it to .srt.
> 
> By keeping WebSRT and SRT as different formats we give the applications a choice to support either, or both in the same parser. If we don't, we force them to deal in a single parser with all the oddities of SRT formats as well as all the extra features and all the extensibility of WebSRT. 
> 

> 
> I think we've made some interesting finds in this thread, but we're starting to go in circles by now. Perhaps we should give it a rest until we get input from a third party. A medal to anyone who has followed it this far :)


  FWIW, I agree with Silvia that a new file extension and MIME type make sense. 

  Keeping them the same won't help applications that don't know about WebSRT, they will try to play the files and aren't likely to deal with the differences gracefully. Keeping them the same also won't help new applications that know about WebSRT, it won't make any difference if there is one MIME type or two.

eric

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