Re: WebOTF Proposal

On Fri, Aug 7, 2009 at 6:47 PM, Tal Leming<tal@typesupply.com> wrote:
> The structure of the XML is more extensible than a binary table.

It is.

I just don't think licensing data is sufficiently complex that it
needs such an elaborate extensible structured data format - I simply
don't think it justifies the extra complexity over a pure binary file
format.

And if it _is_ necessary, I don't see why we shouldn't go the whole
hog and make the whole format, including the header, XML-based,
therefore gain the advantages of XML for the whole format - a format
that would be better structured, human readable, and be more
extensible and future-proof.

Personally, I think this is a middle-ground compromise which gets the
worst of both worlds. By making it binary, it's not human-readable and
you need a specialised tool to make the fonts. By including XML, font
makers need XML parser and read an XML doctype, as well as increasing
the barriers to reading/writing metadata which may discourage people
supporting it at all, which would be the opposite of the intention.

Do any other non-legacy file formats combine binary and XML in this way?