[whatwg] Timed tracks: feedback compendium

[Philip Jägenstedt]

On Fri, 22 Oct 2010 13:49:00 +0200, Silvia Pfeiffer  
<silviapfeiffer1 at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Fri, Oct 22, 2010 at 10:18 PM, Simon Pieters <simonp at opera.com> wrote:
>> On Fri, 22 Oct 2010 13:09:24 +0200, Philip Jägenstedt  
>> <philipj at opera.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>>> Using <!-- --> is a bad idea since the WebSRT syntax already uses  
>>>> -->. I
>>>> don't see the need for multiline comments.
>>>
>>> Right. If we must have comments I think I'd prefer /* ... */ since both
>>> CSS and JavaScript have it, and I can't see that single-line comments  
>>> will
>>> be easier from a parser perspective.
>>
>> Line comments seem better from a compat perspective (you wouldn't get
>> commented out stuff appear as cues in legacy parsers).
>
> Philip's research earlier from this thread was as follows:
>
> ; appears at the beginning of lines in 15/10000 files and most don't look
> like they're intended as comments.
>
> # appears at the beginning of lines in 244/10000 files and most don't  
> look
> like they're intended as comments.
>
> /* only appears in 3/10000 files, so CSS-style comments might work, but
> does add some complexity
>
> // appears at the beginning of lines in 5/10000 files and most look like
> that *are* intended as comments or are garbage, so it should work.
>
> (data from OpenSubtitles sample)
>
> which seems to support the choice of //.

Note that this was assuming that WebSRT should be an extension of SRT. If  
that's not true, we can choose more freely.

> I do wonder what the lines that start with ; or # contained though.

; look mostly like typos, sometimes where " was intended.

# seems to have been mostly used as some kind of emphasis, with #  
sentences like this #

Note, that lots of the files are in languages and encodings unknown to me,  
so my guesses shouldn't be taken too seriously. It's obvious that if  
WebSRT is an extension of SRT (which I no longer think is a good idea),  
then *some* content will break.

-- 
Philip Jägenstedt
Core Developer
Opera Software