RE: New work on fonts at W3C

On Tuesday, June 23, 2009 2:12 AM Brad Kemper wrote:
> 
> If the font requires some custom @font-face rules in the CSS file in
> order to work well, then that block of CSS could also contain a
> comment explaining the restriction further, along with a sentence that
> says, "this text comment block must be included with the @font-face
> rule, unedited, as part of the license requirement."
> 
> Furthermore, the single font could be split into two fonts: one with
> the vowels, odd numbers, and punctuation, and the other with the
> consonants and even numbers, and then brought together via @font-face
> unicode ranges and a font-family stack. This would make it pretty hard
> to accidentally copy it to another site and have it work, without
> first understanding that they are not supposed to. And it would make
> it pretty difficult to use in other applications that do not have
> @font-face rules.

A font isn't just a collection of glyphs - it also contains additional
information such as glyph substitution, positioning and layout tables,
kerning, etc. Ligatures, glyph variants and many advanced features that
are necessary to support complex language scripts such as Arabic and
Indic depend on the layout processing - I don't see how you can split a
font without breaking all this. Many language scripts are syllabic - how
do you plan to handle those fonts?

I am also stunned that you seem to be suggesting that web authors should
go to such a great length and make extra efforts in handling fonts when
targeted font compression seem to present much simpler solution -
compress a font that is hosted on a server, and let browser decompress
it before it passes it on to the OS font engine. To me it seems as the
most straightforward and effortless solution, isn't it?

Regards,
Vladimir

Received on Tuesday, 23 June 2009 19:03:39 UTC