Re: Next step?

On Sun, Oct 25, 2009 at 12:01 PM, Richard Fink <rfink@readableweb.com> wrote:
> Thursday, October 22, 2009 Chris Lilley <chris@w3.org>:
>> There appeared to be consensus on www-font that requiring at least
>> two formats gave a fair and even playing field and maximised
>> interoperability, but recent discussions have questioned this. An
>> alternative 'pick one format and require it for compliance' has been
>> suggested; feedback on these conformance requirements is encouraged.
>
> Chris,
>
> Rather than the "two of four" originally proposed, I would like to propose a
> weighted system for determining compliance.
> Using these values:
>
> WOFF - 3
> CWT - 2
> TTF/OTF - 2
> SVG - 1
>
> A "score" of 5 would mean compliance.

This seems okay.  It works analogously to how we rate compliance in
other realms, frex security, where there are a lot of different
approaches that can possibly be taken - at a certain point you just
say "I'm reasonably certain that you're good enough, however you got
to this score.".

It's still just political wanking, but that may be necessary here, so
shrug.  I don't care overly much which format gets widely supported,
as long as *some* format gets widely supported - I trust browser devs
enough to not saddle me with a sucky format.  Fink's scoring system
here gives some political wiggle room, while still making it almost
certain that at least one format will be interoperably implemented by
all browsers.  It achieves this automatically, too, unlike the 2-of-4
approach which will *likely* lead us to the same result, but will
still require some political wrangling to get it to work.  Fink's
system is simple - if everybody achieves compliance, it's nearly a
certainty that us authors get what we want.

So +1 to this in the charter, if it's not feasible that we just
mandate one or two formats.

~TJ

Received on Monday, 26 October 2009 16:53:47 UTC