MIME types for fonts

Hello WG,

ISO ad hoc group on font format representation is in the process of preparing the application to register the following MIME types for fonts:

-          application/font-ttf - for OT/OFF fonts containing TrueType outlines;

-          application/font-cff - for OT/OFF fonts containing CFF outlines;

-          application/font-off - generic type for OT/OFF fonts that contain only standardized tables, and

-          application/font-sfnt - generic type for any sfnt-based font resource.
As part of this activity, a question was asked if anything needs to be done for WOFF, and I mentioned that WebFonts WG has already registered the type "application/font-woff" for this purpose. In the discussion that followed, it was pointed out that having a font resource identified simply as WOFF may not be enough if UA is running on the platform that may not be able to process certain types of outlines (e.g. it's a CE device that only supports TrueType outlines). Knowing that the resource is encoded as WOFF helps but it may not be enough to actually have the text rendered using that font. A suggestion was that there may be a need to employ additional optional parameters to specify what type of font is packaged in a WOFF file.

Similarly, the questions were asked:

1)      whether multiple different font types are needed, and whether we should consider an alternate solution where there is one generic type (e.g. font-sfnt) and everything else is communicated using additional parameters, and

2)      if we want to keep separate font types for different types of outlines (which I believe makes sense) - should we also consider a set of additional parameters that would tell what kind of layout tables the font resource contains? E.g. application/font-ttf type may use parameters that would define whether it supports OT, AAT or Graphite layout tables.

The text of the ISO amendment will be made public, and as soon as it's available I will post a link to it. Meanwhile, I would really appreciate your thought on this subject, and whether we should also consider adding optional parameters to 'font-woff'.

Thank you,
Vlad