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Comment by ackfoo | Hacker News Reader

Treat data as data. Taking the Subrip format as an example, everything starts out fine so long as there is good bounds checking on the purely textual data.

Then, however, some dipshit decides to extend the format by adding tags for things like bold, italics, underline etc. This is completely unnecessary for subtitles because the emphasis can be inferred from the dialogue. The unnecessary complexity increase the potential for vulnerabilities.

Then some total dickhead decides to add an HTML5 tag, for no reason whatsoever, and it all goes to hell.

This is illustrative of the problem with most software: the absence of a clear-headed benevolent dictator to say, "no; you are an idiot; we're not doing that."

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    This is completely unnecessary for subtitles because
    the emphasis can be inferred from the dialogue.

Seems useful for deaf people

It also seems like you could use it for applications like karaoke.

For certain films it can be vital that subtitles can be styled in multiple ways.

For example: I recently watched the movie "The Handmaiden" which includes both spoken Korean and Japanese. The language the characters speak in any given situation is relevant to the story. If all the subtitles were the same I would not have noticed this destinction.

> Then, however, some dipshit decides to extend the format by adding tags for things like bold, italics, underline etc. This is completely unnecessary for subtitles because the emphasis can be inferred from the dialogue.

Emphasis of an entire line can be inferred, but how can emphasis within a line be inferred when you don't know which utterances within the line correspond to which words in the subtitles (which, if you need subtitles because you don't know the language being spoken, you won't)?

While uncommon, I've occasionally seen font variants used for emphasis on professional subtitles for that reason.

> (which, if you need subtitles because you don't know the language being spoken, you won't)?

Or even more extreme, if you need subtitles because you are deaf.

Then people add full BASE64 fonts inside the subtitles.

Fonts that have a virtual machine in...

Formatting really adds a lot of depth that is important for deaf/hard of hearing people. Maybe you should try thinking about people with disabilities some time.

> Treat data as data.

That doesn't solve the problem. http://langsec.org/

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