Re: .webfont Proposal

Tal Leming wrote:
> We (Erik van Blokland and myself) have been thinking about the various
> proposals that have been put forward on this list and elsewhere. The
> CORS proposal sounded interesting, but with Bert Bos' doubt[1] we went
> back to the drawing board. We had already been thinking about a light
> XML wrapper around font data as an alternative to a new binary format.
> We went back to that and incorporated some of the recent ideas. There is
> no encryption or obfuscation. The markup is very light and, hopefully,
> easy to understand. A demo file is attached. The details:

You get bonus points for clever use of XML (not too much overhead), but
I fail to understand why this would be any better than EOT without MTX
compression?

As I see it, it shares the same cons:

- not implemented by all major browsers
- has rootstrings (except that this does not *require* denial of service
if a string is mismatched, EOT could be re-specified to work similarly)

And the additional cons:

- not implemented by any browser

And the pros:

- does not require custom checksums (mild obfuscation)
- possibly allows compression other than MTX

It seem to me that extending EOT would be much better choice because the
format could be designed to be backwards compatible with existing MSIE
versions. (Obviously any compression method except MTX would not be
compatible with MSIE.)

In the end the choice is between "not implemented by any browser" and
"mild obfuscation". I'd take the mild obfuscation if I get MSIE support
in return.

-- 
Mikko