Re: Next step?

On Thursday, October 22, 2009, 10:22:01 PM, Tab wrote:

TAJ> On Thu, Oct 22, 2009 at 12:35 PM, Chris Lilley <chris@w3.org> wrote:

>> It has the downside that some browser vendors don't like EOT and don't much like CWT either.

TAJ> What's left to dislike about CWT, though?  

I didn't attempt to justify the dislike, merely noted that I had observed it.

>> Announcements and shipping code are different things. Firefox has code that people can use now. While announcements of future direction are all well and good (and its great to see this announcement), the fact that the announcement was preceeded by actual running code makes this more important and more credible.

>> So your 'no-one supports it yet' is incorrect.

TAJ> Sorry, didn't mean to imply quite what you responded to.  The latest
TAJ> public release of FF doesn't support WOFF, correct?

Ah, ok if we are talking about production releases then no. I know that CSS WG insists on only testing full releases. To my mind that emphasis, while well intentioned, misses out on the crucial differences between:

a) someone said in some press release that X would be supported later
b) code to support X is on some cvs branch somewhere
c) code to support X is on the trunk and will go out with the next full release
d) code to support X is on the trunk and will go out with the next full release, and the developers have promised this in public

For WOFF in Mozilla, we are in case d) I think, which is pretty awesome at this early stage and gives other browser makers something to match in terms of commitment.

>> TAJ> but nobody else has made a public move yet.  It's
>> TAJ> also somewhat more complex to decode, as you have to decompress the
>> TAJ> font in a novel way.


>> Barely. I would say that any browser that already uses OpenType to render can (if they wish, and that's the crucial part) add support for CWT or WOFF or both with essentially no impact on total code size or ship dates.

TAJ> Again, excellent.  I didn't mean to imply that it was difficult, but
TAJ> Maciej expressed some concern about the complexity of WOFF in irc, so
TAJ> I wanted to address it here. 

Ah - good on you, then.

Perhaps Jonathan Kew could chime in with an estimation in hours/lines of code needed to add WOFF decoding support?


>> Mandating both is an interesting choice, but risks failure from any browsers that take a stand against CWT.

TAJ> I don't see any reason to stand against CWT, honestly.  It has *none*
TAJ> of the undesirable features of EOT.  It's nothing more than an
TAJ> ordinary TTF file with a header prepended to it.

I agree that the technical grounds for objection seem to be minimal.

I think the objections fall more into game theory. If you see side A with format X and side B with format Y, does A implementing Y (or Y compat-subset) make it more or less likely that B implements X?

This is something that a bit of personal contact and trust building can help with.

TAJ> I'd rather go ahead and take the stand so that people would have to
TAJ> actively come out against it, rather than just ignoring it and letting
TAJ> it die from neglect.  It's a short-term solution, but it's the *best*
TAJ> solution in the short-term we have, so we either need to force it now
TAJ> or ignore it entirely.

That's a reasonable position.



-- 
 Chris Lilley                    mailto:chris@w3.org
 Technical Director, Interaction Domain
 W3C Graphics Activity Lead
 Co-Chair, W3C Hypertext CG

Received on Thursday, 22 October 2009 21:06:01 UTC