RE: Rough draft of WOFF2 spec

Thank you Raph for your dedication and all the efforts that went into developing the WOFF 2.0 wire format and the spec, very much appreciated. Having a draft spec ready for WG review is a huge step forward, and it comes on the hills of recently announced WOFF2 implementation enabled by default in Chrome, which is another significant achievement of the team. Having both the first draft spec and publicly released implementation available for review almost at the same time is a tremendous benefit – I am not sure if there are many Working Groups at W3C who can brag about this level of coordination. ;-)

I will make sure to allocate time on our tomorrow’s call agenda for spec review and future work planning.

Thank you all for the dedication, patience and your participation in this development!
Vlad


From: Raph Levien [mailto:raph@google.com]
Sent: Tuesday, March 25, 2014 2:44 PM
To: public-webfonts-wg@w3.org
Subject: Rough draft of WOFF2 spec

Hi all,

   Apologies for taking so long, but finally I have a draft of the WOFF2 wire format that I think is useful to share.

   I'll be checking this in to W3C's version control system soon, so we can apply proper processes for maintaining it. In the meantime, I'm very happy to get comments and feedback. In particular, right now I'd particularly like to hear people's take on which parts (if any) are reasonably solid, and which need more work, and in the latter case what kinds of improvements are most important.

   The triplet coding in particular is not filled in, and the draft contains a reference to the MTX submission. However, that is an informative, not a normative reference, and ultimately the WOFF 2 spec should contain a full description and not rely on the MTX submission. Vlad has generously volunteered to work on this part. I consider it one of the least "tricky" or controversial aspects of the spec, because the triplet encoding itself is identical to MTX and there are multiple independent implementations of that.

   Also speaking of normative referenecs, right now, the [Brotli] reference links to the draft spec in the open source release of Brotli. I think this is useful for a rough draft, but obviously this will need to be replaced with the real reference as soon as that spec is properly published. I hope to have an update on the status of the Brotli spec by tomorrow's call.

   Thanks to Vlad, David, and Chris Lilley for help and encouragement getting this draft written, and of course everybody who's been participating.

   I look forward to discussing this draft on the call tomorrow.

Raph