Drop Plugins section from “Adding captions and subtitles to HTML video”

[sideshowbarker]

Fixes https://github.com/mdn/content/issues/22176. This is a good example of why it’s problematic to include listings of 3rd-party tools in MDN articles: Nobody ever actively maintains them — and in most cases, the 3rd-party-tools lists were created in the wiki days, without ever getting review scrutiny.

So we really have no reason to be confident to begin with that these lists actually contain quality tools, nor any reason to be confident that the lists are at all up to date.

In this case, as noted in https://github.com/mdn/content/issues/22176, the Plugins list in this article contains multiple tools whose sites are now 404.

And on top of that, the tools in this Plugins list aren’t even tools that developers can use for help in developing their own implementations; instead, the list has a very different purpose:

If, after reading through this article you decide that you can't be bothered to do all of this and want someone else to do it for you, there are plenty of plugins out there that offer caption and subtitle support that you can use.

In general, providing lists of tools in MDN for cases where developers “can’t be bothered” to do development using the features that MDN is documenting and instead “want someone else to do it for you” seems pretty at odds altogether with what MDN is supposed to be for.

[github-actions[bot]]

Preview URLs

• /en-US/docs/Web/Guide/Audio_and_video_delivery/Adding_captions_and_subtitles_to_HTML5_video

(this comment was updated 2022-11-15 05:22:35.225787)

[wbamberg]

I'm conflicted about this.

One the one hand: yes, we are bad at keeping these things up to date, and in particular we have a lot of legacy from the Wiki era when people could just add their pet projects.

On the other hand these things surely are helpful to people sometimes, and I don't think saying "if you can't be bothered to code it from scratch we're not going to help you" is helpful. There's nothing wrong with people using tools and libraries, and in theory we could help by recommending good ones. In that context I think the wording in this page about "you can't be bothered to do all of this and want someone else to do it for you" is really, really unfortunate.

I think it is hard to argue that we want to remove all links to external tools, and if we don't, then we need criteria to decide when this is OK. At the moment we don't have good criteria: for example, we quite recently added a link to this page (https://github.com/mdn/content/pull/13065). Were we wrong then? Are we wrong now?

I also wonder if it would help somehow to mark up external-links-to-tools, so we could (for instance) periodically assess what we have across the site and whether we are still happy with it. For example, we could list items in front matter, or have them in a dedicated "Third-party tools" section, like we have "See also" at the moment.

And/or we could have more and more precise criteria, like:

• must be open source
• must be free to use (?)
• must have been in existence for > 2 years
• must have regular maintenance/bug fixes/security updates in the last year
• ...

[estelle]

If we had one or two, that would be fine, but this looks like it was attacked by a bunch of marketing teams that added their projects. Even our URL "HTML5 videos" is outdated. https://videosws.praegnanz.de/, which lists all these, lists flash fallbacks. i think flash is long dead, so assume this link was long abandoned.

Edit: Thinking about it more: There are hundreds of services that do this now, HTML that edits it, etc. i don't think we need to advertise anyone in particular.