Re: Next step?

Sylvain Galineau wrote:

> It's simply the best suggestion to date, imo. Blessing some ideal mono-cultural future has 
> no appeal to me because I have hundreds of millions of users now and don't have the luxury
> of moving them forward at my preferred pace (although Windows 7 will help). Implementing
> all these formats will not happen. So any intermediate formula that:
> a) skirts all the usual dead-end controversies,
> b) is in fact very likely, in practice, to result in one common cross-browser format,
> c) acknowledges the existence and reality of the web as it is and will be for several more years by 
> accepting and formalizing a simple compatible option. 

I am fully in favour of formalising CWT. I've invested a lot of time and 
a certain amount of professional credibility in endorsing that format. 
Most of my colleagues have as little interest in CWT as they had in EOT, 
but they're almost unanimously in favour of WOFF.

I don't really see that the any-2-of-4 conformance requirement changes 
the situation for CWT. As you have stated yourself, any-2-of-4 will is 
most likely to result in WOFF+1, and the major browsers already have 
their +1 in place. Are you thinking that an any-2-of-4 conformance 
requirement might prompt some non-IE browser to select a formalised CWT 
for their conforming second format support? That doesn't make sense to 
me, because CWT support in non-IE browsers is only likely to happen if 
it is market driven, so it is most likely to occur in a WOFF+2 
situation, in which case the conformance requirement is irrelevant.

> I think you assume a more open, less prescriptive requirement is more likely to yield a worse outcome than 
> a very restricted and prescriptive one. 

No, I don't think that. I'm just having trouble seeing the upside for 
any-2-of-4. I'm having trouble understanding why conformance should 
oblige any new browser to support more than one format, which strikes me 
an unnecessary work. And that seems to me a technical argument.

John Hudson

Received on Thursday, 22 October 2009 07:23:17 UTC