From: Vangelis forthnet
Sent: Friday, November 3, 2017 1:41 AM


On Fri Oct 27 22:16:03 BST 2017, Ralph Corderoy wrote:

If the BBC haven't already been informed
that a particular URL serves broken XML
then that's the first thing to change,
including pointing out the NUL bytes that are causing the problem.
I'm sure they'd like to work out what went wrong,
and stop it happening again.

It looks as though the problem has been fixed upstream!
After navigating to (geo-filtered):

http://open.live.bbc.co.uk/mediaselector/5/select/version/2.0/mediaset/iptv-all/vpid/b09c79wx

all three "connection href"s for service="captions"
load and render perfectly now in Firefox,
without generating an XML Parsing Error...
Someone from the BBC staff does browse
this list or was it perhaps an in-house find?

That’s interesting. I don’t know whether anyone tried to view Suspicion in the iPlayer with subtitles to see if that was affected, but is seems more likely that the BBC would respond to something causing an error in the iPlayer. The BBC does correct errors. When we had problems with missing segment errors in HLS, many programmes were corrected a week or so after broadcast.

What is more interesting is that neither the file you refer to nor the captions file it links to
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/subtitles/ng/modav/bUnknown-5df25dc8-d38f-43e5-93a2-38b6c778f852_b09c79wx_1509625417009.xml
are XML files.

As I understand it, an XML file has to begin <xml>, have a link in its header to the DTD, and end <\xml>.

I may be slightly wrong about that.  The problem subtitles file began
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

The media selection file you refer to begins
-<mediaSelection>
where - is a dash character I can't copy. Other <media> tags are preceded by a similar dash character.

The captions file begins
-<tt ttp:timeBase="media" xml:lang="en">
where again - is a dash character.

For both files Firefox displays a banner reading
This XML file does not appear to have any style information associated with it. The document tree is shown below.

I have been meaning to reply to Ralph and the others who commented. I was going to do it here, but to avoid making this email any longer I'll do it in a separate email, except to draw attention to the Wikipedia article on TimedText_Markup_Language which you have already referred to
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timed_Text_Markup_Language
and in particular reference 2, WebVTT versus TTML: XML considered harmful for web captions?
http://www.balisage.net/Proceedings/vol10/html/Tai01/BalisageVol10-Tai01.html

Under the heading "Established industries versus emerging user communities" it says,

"While XML has been well received and is used in established industries, it has at least a disputable role on the web. The most prominent areas of debate are the draconian error handling implemented by XHMTL supporting web browsers and the growing suppression of XML through JSON as an interchange format for data on the web."

Best wishes
Richard



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