Re: WebOTF Proposal

On Thu, Aug 6, 2009 at 8:10 PM, Tal Leming<tal@typesupply.com> wrote:
> We, (Jonathan Kew, Erik van Blokland and myself) have combined our ZOT and
> .webfont proposals into a new WebOTF proposal. The full specification is
> attached.
>
> In short:
> - The ZOT compression scheme is retained.
> - The XML data from the .webfont proposal, in a reduced and refactored form,
> is stored within the WebOTF file.

On Thu, Aug 6, 2009 at 8:10 PM, Tal Leming<tal@typesupply.com> wrote:
> We, (Jonathan Kew, Erik van Blokland and myself) have combined our ZOT and
> .webfont proposals into a new WebOTF proposal. The full specification is
> attached.
>
> In short:
> - The ZOT compression scheme is retained.
> - The XML data from the .webfont proposal, in a reduced and refactored form,
> is stored within the WebOTF file.

Out of interest, what is the logic behind storing XML within a binary
file? My belief was the main advantage of the .webfont proposal being
XML and .zip-based was that it was easily constructed by commonly
available tools and the XML was human-readable, whereas a new binary
file format is inherently neither, and XML adds an unnecessary layer
of complexity to any WebOTF creator or parser (although I concede that
web-browsers will already have XML parsers built-in).

Unless there's a compelling reason to use XML that I've overlooked, I
think a good old-fashioned table would be a simpler,
easier-to-implement solution that does mostly the same thing.

Received on Friday, 7 August 2009 11:26:48 UTC