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Bug 23239 - "description" & "descriptions" would seem to be ripe for easy and confusing bugs: http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/the-video-element.html#dom-videotrack-kind
Summary: "description" & "descriptions" would seem to be ripe for easy and confusing b...
Status: RESOLVED FIXED
Alias: None
Product: WHATWG
Classification: Unclassified
Component: HTML (show other bugs)
Version: unspecified
Hardware: Other other
: P3 normal
Target Milestone: Unsorted
Assignee: Ian 'Hixie' Hickson
QA Contact: contributor
URL: http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/...
Whiteboard:
Keywords:
Depends on:
Blocks: 23402
  Show dependency tree / graph
 
Reported: 2013-09-13 12:18 UTC by contributor
Modified: 2013-09-30 18:52 UTC (History)
3 users (show)

See Also:

Attachments

Description contributor 2013-09-13 12:18:42 UTC 
Specification: http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/the-video-element.html
Multipage: http://www.whatwg.org/C#attr-track-kind-descriptions
Complete: http://www.whatwg.org/c#attr-track-kind-descriptions
Referrer: http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/video.html

Comment:
"description" & "descriptions" would seem to be ripe for easy and confusing
bugs:
http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/the-video-element.
html#dom-videotrack-kind

Posted from: 87.114.244.189
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; rv:25.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/25.0
Comment 1 Ian 'Hixie' Hickson 2013-09-16 18:00:46 UTC 
Can you elaborate?
Comment 2 Neil Stansbury 2013-09-16 22:09:25 UTC 
(In reply to Ian 'Hixie' Hickson from comment #1)
> Can you elaborate?

Hey Ian,

Sure, I am just working on a JS implementation, consuming some common interface definitions, and I discovered a bug I'd introduced in my code because the plurality of the two strings was different.

http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/the-video-element.html#attr-track-kind-keyword-descriptions

Says:
"Textual descriptions of the video component of the media resource, intended for audio synthesis when the visual component is obscured, unavailable, or not usable (e.g. because the user is interacting with the application without a screen while driving, or because the user is blind). Synthesized as audio."

http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/embedded-content-0.html#dom-videotrack-kind
Says:
"An audio description of a video track."

As I read the specs, both definitions are either so fundamentally different (textual vs audio only) or so similar(both audio descriptions of a track), I actually can't tease out the usage scenarios where they are different, and so would suggest that the plurality should be consistent, or obviously totally different.
Comment 3 Ian 'Hixie' Hickson 2013-09-17 20:09:23 UTC 
Well, one is text, and one is sound. The text one is intended to be synthesised into sound by the computer. So, they're both very similar and different at the same time.

Would renaming "description" to "descriptions" help? Or is the problem more fundamental? I don't really understand the confusion. These are keywords used to describe quite different things.
Comment 4 Neil Stansbury 2013-09-18 08:04:57 UTC 
(In reply to Ian 'Hixie' Hickson from comment #3)
> Well, one is text, and one is sound. The text one is intended to be
> synthesised into sound by the computer. So, they're both very similar and
> different at the same time.
> 
> Would renaming "description" to "descriptions" help? Or is the problem more
> fundamental? I don't really understand the confusion. These are keywords
> used to describe quite different things.

I do appreciate the semantic differences now, but at the time I didn't notice my additional "s" when checking the kind of video track, and so took a while to discover my own bug, an extra "s" on a string word is easy to miss!

In the end I assigned constants TEXT_DESCRIPTION and ORAL_DESCRIPTION to ensure I don't reproduce that error anywhere else and remind myself of the semantic differences.

I would argue that the values should either be identical as they are both "describing" a track, or so different that the semantic meaning is obvious in the string differences.
Comment 5 Ian 'Hixie' Hickson 2013-09-23 20:14:27 UTC 
Ok. Hopefully there's not too many implementations already...
Comment 6 contributor 2013-09-23 20:14:37 UTC 
Checked in as WHATWG revision r8195.
Check-in comment: Change 'description' to the plural form so that videoTrack.kind is consistent with textTrack.kind, as it is for captions and subtitles already
http://html5.org/tools/web-apps-tracker?from=8194&to=8195