[whatwg] <track> / WebVTT issues

[Glenn Maynard]

On Wed, Sep 21, 2011 at 2:12 PM, Ralph Giles <giles at mozilla.com> wrote:

> feature request:
>>
>> COMMENT -->
>> this is a comment, bla bla
>>
> If you look at the source of the spec, you'll find comments as a v2
>
> I don't like the format either. I do think it's very important we have some
> mechanism for multi-line file level metadata, embedded css, etc. so the
> files can live on their own.
>
> The syntax section also suggests all metadata has to be on the signature
> line, while the parser will actually skip everything between the signature
> and the first double line terminator.
>
> For in-caption, <! comment> is a good idea. Semantically it's a bit weird
> to not mention it in the spec, since everything else has an end tag, but the
> parser will ignore it as we want.
>

My take on in-caption comments was to put them in a class and hide the
class, with the advantage of the comments being available programmatically
(you can toggle them on for editing purposes by un-hiding the class) and
requiring no additional specification, though the disadvantage that you need
a stylesheet to properly view the resulting file.  To avoid that, maybe a
separate span type would be better, analogous to the "hidden" HTML
attribute.

(I don't want to restart the whole comment discussion, but it'd be
unfortunate if the desired syntax for inline comments never happens due to
being punted to v2 and then being impossible to make backwards-compatible
with v1.)

-- 
Glenn Maynard