14646 – <track> Don't use one-letter settings. They are non-intuitive and hard to remember. It makes little sense to use a single letter for the setting but then a sensible string for the value. Please use "align" instead of "A", etc.

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Bug 14646 - <track> Don't use one-letter settings. They are non-intuitive and hard to remember. It makes little sense to use a single letter for the setting but then a sensible string for the value. Please use "align" instead of "A", etc.

Summary: <track> Don't use one-letter settings. They are non-intuitive and hard to rem...

Status:	RESOLVED FIXED

Alias:	None

Product:	WHATWG
Classification:	Unclassified
Component:	HTML (show other bugs)
Version:	unspecified
Hardware:	Other other

Importance:	P3 critical
Target Milestone:	Unsorted
Assignee:	Ian 'Hixie' Hickson
QA Contact:	contributor

URL:	http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/...
Whiteboard:
Keywords:

Depends on:
Blocks:	14929
	Show dependency tree / graph

Reported:	2011-10-31 22:25 UTC by contributor
Modified:	2012-07-18 18:40 UTC (History)
CC List:	6 users (show)

See Also:

Attachments

Description contributor 2011-10-31 22:25:24 UTC

Specification: http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/the-video-element.html
Multipage: http://www.whatwg.org/C#parsing-0
Complete: http://www.whatwg.org/c#parsing-0

Comment:
<track> Don't use one-letter settings. They are non-intuitive and hard to
remember. It makes little sense to use a single letter for the setting but
then a sensible string for the value. Please use "align" instead of "A", etc.

Posted from: 2001:4c28:a030:30:223:32ff:fec2:96fa by simonp@opera.com
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_5_8) AppleWebKit/535.7 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/16.0.912.15 Safari/535.7

Comment 1 Ian 'Hixie' Hickson 2011-11-01 02:07:59 UTC

I don't understand your distinction between value and setting. Can you show an example of a few cues with the syntax you're suggesting?

Comment 2 Simon Pieters 2011-11-01 08:57:55 UTC

00:30.000 --> 00:31.500 align:end size:50%
<v Roger Bingham>When we e-mailed—

00:30.500 --> 00:32.500 align:start size:50%
<v Neil deGrasse Tyson>Didn't we talk about enough in that conversation?

00:32.000 --> 00:35.500 align:end size:50%
<v Roger Bingham>No! No no no no; 'cos 'cos obviously 'cos

00:32.500 --> 00:33.500 align:start size:50%
<v Neil deGrasse Tyson><i>Laughs</i>

Comment 3 Ian 'Hixie' Hickson 2011-11-01 16:05:05 UTC

Wouldn't that be like having <paragraph>, <emphasis>, and <linebreak> instead of <p>, <em>, and <br>? I mean, I agree that for someone new to the language it's more approachable, but at the end of the day there's only a few of these and making them short has the distinct advantage of making it easier to type once you know what they are.

Note that this is directly derived from similar things in SRT.

Comment 4 Simon Pieters 2011-11-01 21:02:01 UTC

Not really. <p> is very common in HTML. You use it all the time. Using settings in VTT is rare. In our SRT sample, most files don't have any settings.

Moreover, SRT's settings are X1, X2, Y1, Y2, which are easier to memorize and understand what they do compared to VTT's D, L, T, S, A. I have to look up VTT's settings every time (listing them here was no exception, and after having done so I'm not sure which letter map to which setting without looking at the spec again), and I have been exposed to VTT more than the average VTT author we're trying to target.

Comment 5 Simon Pieters 2011-11-01 22:07:34 UTC

(In reply to comment #4)
> In our SRT sample, most files don't have any settings.

grep -rh '.*[-][-]>.* [XY][12]:[0-9]' .

57,523 lines. (There are about 52,000,000 lines that contain -->.)

Comment 6 Philip Jägenstedt 2011-11-02 10:07:20 UTC

I have to agree with Simon. I'm trying to figure out how some settings interact now and I have to look at the spec to figure out which letter to use, they're just not mnemonic enough for me.

Comment 7 Ian 'Hixie' Hickson 2011-11-02 20:50:30 UTC

Fair enough.

D: will become vertical: and the values will be changed to lr and rl
L: will become line:
T: will become position:
S: will become size:
A: will become align:

Comment 8 contributor 2012-01-30 20:48:55 UTC

Checked in as WHATWG revision r6934.
Check-in comment: Change the settings to be less tersely named.
http://html5.org/tools/web-apps-tracker?from=6933&to=6934