[whatwg] SRT research: timestamps

[Philip Jägenstedt]

On Thu, 06 Oct 2011 07:36:00 +0200, Silvia Pfeiffer  
<silviapfeiffer1 at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Oct 6, 2011 at 10:51 AM, Ralph Giles <giles at mozilla.com> wrote:
>> On 05/10/11 04:36 PM, Glenn Maynard wrote:
>>
>>> If the files don't work in VTT in any major implementation, then  
>>> probably
>>> not many.  It's the fault of overly-lenient parsers that these things  
>>> happen
>>> in the first place.
>>
>> A point Philip Jägenstedt has made is that it's sufficiently tedious to
>> verify correct subtitle playback that authors are unlikely to do so with
>> any vigilance. Therefore the better trade-off is to make the parser
>> forgiving, rather than inflict the occasional missing cue on viewers.
>
> That's a slippery slope to go down on. If they cannot see the
> consequence, they assume it's legal. It's not like we are totally
> screwing up the display - there's only one mis-authored cue missing.
> If we accept one type of mis-authoring, where do you stop with
> accepting weirdness? How can you make compatible implementations if
> everyone decides for themselves what weirdness that is not in the spec
> they accept?
>
> I'd rather we have strict parsing and recover from brokenness. It's
> the job of validators to identify broken cues. We should teach authors
> to use validators before they decide that their files are ok.
>
> As for some of the more dominant mis-authorings: we can accept them as
> correct authoring, but then they have to be made part of the
> specification and legalized.

To clarify, I have certainly never suggested that implementation do  
anything other than follow the spec to the letter. I *have* suggested that  
the parsing spec be more tolerant of certain errors, but looking at the  
extremely low error rates in our sample I have to conclude that either (1)  
the data is biased or (2) most of these errors are not common enough that  
they need to be handled.

-- 
Philip Jägenstedt
Core Developer
Opera Software