RE: Fonts WG Charter feedback

Also sprach Levantovsky, Vladimir:

 > >  > We accept it's not up to us to pick the outcome; and if that means
 > >  > dumping EOT, so be it.
 > > 
 > > And replacing it with a backwards-compatible format, I presume?
 > > Otherwise, users would be equally "screwed", no?
 > 
 > And if you and I do care about authors (as you indicated in your
 > ATypI presentation), than backward-compatible solution that can be
 > implemented and deployed fast and with minimal efforts should be
 > our first priority.

Yes. That can be done today, I believe, by serving EOT to IE and TT/OT
to others. 

So, from a /technical/ point of view, there is no need for a new format.

Another point that hasn't been discussed much is how long it takes to
charter, write, vote, implement, test, deploy, and bug-fix a new W3C
Recommendation. We have some numbers here:

 - W3C released the PNG Recommendation in October 1996. It took exactly
   a decade for all browsers to add full support for PNG images: IE7
   was released in October 2006

 - CSS2 was released in 1998. This year, more than a decade later, we
   reached a point where all major browsers supports all major CSS2
   features (that survived the CSS 2.1 pruning efforts).

 - SVG 1.0 became a W3C Recommendation in September 2001, but is still
   not supported by all major browsers. 

Cheers,

-h&kon
              Håkon Wium Lie                          CTO °þe®ª
howcome@opera.com                  http://people.opera.com/howcome