RE: specification for Mozilla's SVG in OpenType proposal

I'd like to take a step back for a moment.

At first glance, this proposal seems to have been developed with no reference to the discussions that have been taking place on this list re. various design decisions.

For example, one of the first design decisions was whether all glyphs were to be represented in a single SVG doc, each glyph in its own doc, or a hybrid or chunking approach (multiple SVG docs each containing one or more glyphs). I recall the consensus being the first option, and this was reflected in the Adobe draft proposals. However, Mozilla's proposal uses the third option. Is this a deliberate choice and preference, or simply the way Mozilla's implementation happened to have done it, unaware of (or perhaps predating) discussions on this list?

Another example is the proposed new glyphchar attribute. This goes against the principle that the SVG glyph descriptions are purely graphical, and that all semantics and metrics are to be taken from the usual OT tables ('cmap', 'hmtx', etc).

So this proposal seems to have taken the discussion back to the drawing board in at least a couple of ways. This is fine if reasons are offered that weren't discussed before, but I don't see any.


I share Vlad's concern re. sufficient advance notice (the Adobe Tech Summit is this week).

That said, thanks for jumping back into the discussion, Cam. I look forward to some meaningful discussion both at the F2F (Thu Feb 7, 2 pm Pacific Time is the information I've been given) and subsequently on this list.

Sairus


-----Original Message-----
From: Cameron McCormack [mailto:cam@mcc.id.au] 
Sent: Thursday, January 31, 2013 4:14 PM
To: public-svgopentype@w3.org
Subject: specification for Mozilla's SVG in OpenType proposal

Hi there,

First, I must apologise for not having engaged on the mailing list for some months.

Edwin Flores, who wrote our SVG-in-OpenType implementation in Firefox, and I have put together a specification for our proposal:

   http://dev.w3.org/SVG/modules/fonts/SVG-OpenType.html

This documents our implementation, aside from the fact that we currently do not support animations in glyphs and we have not updated the property value names from -moz-objectFill to context-fill, etc. (which is https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=798843).

Obviously this still has some differences to Sairus' proposal.  This represents our (Mozilla's, to the extent of people who have been involved in developing it) view of what the SVG-in-OpenType feature should look like, but this is not necessarily the view of the entire SVG Working Group.  Next week the SVG WG has a face-to-face meeting in Sydney, so I intend to bring up this feature and the differences between this proposal and Sairus' to see if other members of the group have views them.

Thanks, and I will try to be more responsive on the list.

Cameron

Received on Tuesday, 5 February 2013 20:49:36 UTC