[whatwg] Reconsidering how we deal with text track cues

[Brendan Long]

On 06/17/2013 12:41 AM, Silvia Pfeiffer wrote:
>> Why VTTCaptionCue and not just HTMLCue? It seems like any cue that can
>> be rendered needs to be able to provide its content as HTML, and once we
>> have that, the browser shouldn't care where we got that HTML from.
> That could indeed be a different way to approach caption cues.
> However, authoring caption text on video with only the formatting
> markup that a caption may need and limiting HTML functionality to
> features that captions need was one of the motivations for creating
> WebVTT.
I don't think it's necessary to use the same language for authoring as
display though. Since we already have rules for rendering HTML, and
WebVTT seems to be a subset of HTML (with some special CSS rules, and
some shorthand tags), I think the easiest way to handle it would be to
translate WebVTT cues into HTML+CSS, then rely on the existing rendering
engine.