[whatwg] Reconsidering how we deal with text track cues

[Silvia Pfeiffer]

On Tue, Jun 18, 2013 at 12:57 PM, Brendan Long <self at brendanlong.com> wrote:
> 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.

That's exactly what the WebVTT rendering algorithm does and HTMLCue is
not necessary for this.

However, you should be able to author WebVTT cues in JavaScript -
that's what WebVTTCue was created for.

HTH,
Silvia.