Re: Format name proposals

> JH:
>> [By the way, since the OT and OFF specs are not formally identical  
>> and with no guarantee against them diverging at some stage, I  
>> wonder if there is a benefit to the web font format in choosing one  
>> of these as the formal definition of the fontdata format?]
>
JK:
> I'm not sure there's any real benefit there. WebOTF or WOFF or  
> whatever we call it is really a repackaging of sfnt data, and is  
> independent of the details of what's inside the sfnt tables. It's  
> true that if OpenType and OFF were to diverge, implementers would  
> have to choose what to support, but that's equally true for "raw"  
> sfnt data as for sfnt-repackaged-in-EOT/EOTL/WOFF/whatever, and  
> doesn't directly affect the actual web-repackaging formats.

There might also be good reasons for allowing WebOTFs which don't  
expand to fully working fonts at all.

For example, one might conceive of web pages linking to a web font  
that contains only the glyphs required to render that page. Successive  
page views on the same site would request only the additional glyphs  
needed to render the new page, via a WebOTF that contained the new  
glyphs - just a loca and glyf table - which would be inserted into the  
correct place in a font being gradually built up by the browser.

- L

Received on Tuesday, 18 August 2009 21:01:04 UTC