Re: Firefox "Intent to Implement" WOFF2

On 3/10/14 17:20, David Kuettel wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 3, 2014 at 9:08 AM, Levantovsky, Vladimir
> <Vladimir.Levantovsky@monotype.com
> <mailto:Vladimir.Levantovsky@monotype.com>> wrote:
>
>     Great, thank you Jonathan and Chris!
>
>
> Wow, that is absolutely fantastic!  Great work Jonathan!
>
> We will target enabling WOFF 2.0 support for Firefox (Gecko 35+) for
> Google Fonts.
>

Thanks, David.

Note that we are likely to ship this, initially at least, behind a 
runtime pref, so you can't rely solely on the Gecko version to determine 
whether WOFF 2 is supported.

I think the proper approach for a webfonts service is to offer both 
WOFF2 and WOFF [and EOT/TTF/SVG/anything else you care to provide] 
resources, with the appropriate format hints in the @font-face rule, 
allowing the browser to choose which resource to fetch according to its 
current capabilities.

Even once we ship with WOFF2 enabled by default (which may not be the 
case in the first release where we ship the code), it'll still be 
possible for users to disable it -- or for us to disable it in an 
update, e.g. if a nasty security issue were suddenly found in the 
decoder -- and then we'd want to fall back to requesting WOFF fonts. If 
a webfont service offers *only* WOFF2, based on sniffing the browser 
version, webfonts would break completely in this scenario, whereas 
offering multiple resources with format hints provides a graceful fallback.

JK

Received on Friday, 3 October 2014 16:34:37 UTC