[whatwg] WebSRT feedback

[Philip Jägenstedt]

On Fri, 08 Oct 2010 06:00:25 -0700, Jeroen Wijering  
<jeroen at longtailvideo.com> wrote:

>
> On Oct 8, 2010, at 2:24 PM, whatwg-request at lists.whatwg.org wrote:
>
>>> Even if very few subtitles use inline SVG, SVG in <object>, <img>,
>>> <iframe>, <video>, self-referencing <track>, etc in the cue text, all
>>> implementations would have to support it in the same way for it to be
>>> interoperable. That's quite an undertaking and I don't think it's  
>>> really
>>> worth it.
>>>
>>
>> User agents only need to be interoperable over the common subset of HTML
>> features they support. HTML is mostly designed to degrade gracefully  
>> when a
>> user agent encounters elements it doesn't support. The simplest possible
>> video player would use an HTML parser (hopefully off-the-shelf) to build
>> some kind of DOM structure. Then it can group text into paragraphs for
>> rendering, and ignore the rest of the content.
>>
>> In practice, we'll have to deal with user agents that support different  
>> sets
>> of WebSRT features --- when version 2 of WebSRT is developed, if not  
>> before.
>> Why not use existing, proven machinery --- HTML --- to cope with that
>> situation?
>>
>> Rob
>
> The requests we receive on the captioning functionality of the JW Player  
> always revolve around styling. Font size, color, style, weight, outline  
> and family. Block x, y, width, height, text-align, vertical-align,  
> padding, margin, background and alpha. Both for an entire SRT file, for  
> distinct captioning entries and for specific parts of a captioning  
> entry. Not to say that a full parsing engine wouldn't be nice or useful,  
> but at present there's simply no requests for it (not even for <a> ;).  
> Plus, more advanced timed track applications can easily be built with  
> javascript (timed boucing 3D balls using WebGL).
>
> W3C's timed text does a decent job in facilitating the styling needs for  
> captioning authors. Overall regions, single paragraphs and inline chunks  
> (through <span>) can be styled. There are a few small misses, such as  
> text outline, and vertical alignment (which can be done with separate  
> regions though). IMO the biggest con of TT is that it uses its own,  
> in-document styling namespace, instead of relying upon page CSS.
>
> Kind regards,
>
> Jeroen


-- 
Philip Jägenstedt
Core Developer
Opera Software