Chris Bass authored Apr 25, 2017 and Sebastian Dröge committed Apr 25, 2017

A common subtitling use case is live-generated subtitles, in which each
new word is contained in its own span, and the spans are displayed
sequentially, with the effect that lines of displayed subtitles are
built up word-by-word.

This can, however, cause problems when the number of words in a block is
greater than the number of allowed GstMemorys in a GstBuffer.

Since in this use case each span will have the same styling as adjacent
spans, we can join adjacent spans (and other inline elements, such as
breaks) into a single element containing the concatenated text of each,
thus avoiding the limit of GstMemorys in a GstBuffer and also reducing
the amount of styling/layout metadata that is attached to each buffer.

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=781725