[whatwg] Google Feedback on the HTML5 media a11y specifications

[Glenn Maynard]

On Tue, Feb 15, 2011 at 7:01 PM, Silvia Pfeiffer
<silviapfeiffer1 at gmail.com> wrote:
> I would prefer if we could stick with a line based approach to this
> issue and something that can be resolved without having to look at a
> style sheet. If we do it this way, it doesn't become a pre-processor
> type comment any more and leaks everywhere, which can be a real
> nuisance, in particular for players that won't interpret the classes
> and only strip the <c> tags.

I'm referring to a specific, real-world use case: being able to put
comments in the middle of a cue, typically editing notes.  This is one
of the reasons why I don't like the idea of line-based comments.  I
suggested the above as another possible way to handle that use case,
not as a generic way to write comments, since it could only be used
within cue text.

The ability to display these notes inline while viewing the captions
is very useful--it's something I've specifically wanted in the past
with other caption formats.  In fact, this would allow different
editors to mark their comments, in order to, for example, display
comments by different editors in different colors.  <c.glenn>...</c>

It's annoying that players not supporting CSS would display these by
default.  It's not hard, in principle, to deal with it: add a node
type identical to <c>, but with a default of "display: none" (and
maybe an extra implicit class name, for CSS matching), eg.
<x.glenn>...</x>.  I doubt it's worth the spec noise, though;
stripping the comments for distribution is a simple workaround, if not
exactly ideal.

-- 
Glenn Maynard