Re: WebVTT feedback

On Wed, Dec 21, 2011 at 8:08 PM, David Singer <singer@apple.com> wrote:

> I'm not sure I follow all this, but I don't see the problem with saying
> "if you want your text to look right, use the right Unicode characters and
> tag with the right languages, if necessary at the <span> level".
>
> Saying that the results of including say Chinese characters in a span
> labelled as in say, Klingon, may result in unexpected, unpredictable,
> behavior, up to and including angry Klingons invading your workspace, seems
> to be not too bad, IMHO.  You want to be safe from said Klingons?  Label
> your languages!
>

This misses the real-world problems it causes.

When CJK characters are unlabelled or marked as non-CJK, current browser
behavior--in IE and Firefox, at least--depends on the user's language.

This means that if you don't tag your language (or tag it incorrectly),
it'll look right to you, the author.  It'll also look right to lots of your
viewers; if your page is Japanese, there's a good chance that most of your
viewers are on Japanese systems.  But as soon as someone in a different
locale views your page, this is no longer the case, and a lot of authors
will never notice this since most people don't test their page in lots of
different locales (and shouldn't be expected to).

It's the same problem that charsets have: if you don't set a charset,
browsers choose a default that depends on the user's locale, leading to
pages that render fine for you and many of your users, but which break for
people in different locales.

This is exactly the sort of interop failure that the web platform tries
hard to prevent.


(As a side note, the charset problem is definitely more serious, since it
tends to result in badly broken pages instead of wrong glyph selection.
The pattern of the problem, however, is exactly the same: locale
dependencies causing the creation of locale-dependent content.)

-- 
Glenn Maynard