[TheFluff]

Originally Posted by Quarkboy

Actually, though, it's probably better for them to use the xml type format, as it's far easier to parse than ssa (which I've been told is notoriously annoying to parse). It'll be easier for people to write software that manipulates it.

It's also much more difficult to try to edit it in a normal text editor. XML might be easy to parse, but it's incredibly annoying for humans to write subtitles in. Consider the following (from one of the USF samples):

<subtitle start="00:00:26.000" stop="00:00:30.000">
      <text>Size : <font size="14">14</font>-<font size="16">16</font>-<font size="20">20</font>-<font size="26">26</font>-<font size="40">40</font>...</text>
</subtitle>

<subtitle start="00:00:58.000" stop="00:01:01.000">
      <karaoke style="MusicLyrics"><k t="500"/><font color="#00AAFF">Multi-colors</font><k t="500"/> and <k t="500"/><font color="#00FFAA">Multi-lines</font><br/><k t="1500"/>Karaokeeeee!!!</karaoke>
</subtitle>

Feel like shuddering yet? I certainly do. Some annoyance at the programmers part once is probably prefereable to the annoyance of every typesetter in existence every time they use the format... Now, I'm not saying SSA is perfect, because it's certainly not (it has HUGE amounts of annoying quirks, some of them caused by the ancient evil VSFilter), but the syntax is certainly better than XML, at least for humans.