Re: css3-fonts: should not dictate usage policy with respect to origin

Sylvain Galineau:
> [Christoph Päper:]
>> 
>> Sylvain Galineau:
> It's not a transport layer restriction; the transport layer doesn't know nor care about fonts.

That’s right, and neither should ‘url()’.

> It's a restriction on requests made on behalf of the @font-face src descriptor

Special-casing ‘url()’ like that is comparable to requiring ‘hsl(400, 0%, 0%)’ to be interpreted the same as ‘hsl(40, 0%, 0%)’ for ‘color’ and as ‘hsl(360, 0%, 0%)’ for ‘background-color’.

This is what your concerns sound like to me: “We adhere to commercial font vendor demands, whether they’re sound or not. This results in complications for authors and users which don’t happen with competing browsers. To level the field, we want to require everyone to follow those restrictions. To make that more probable, we want the requirement in a specification that the others want to comply to anyway.”

> If you don't see the merits of making sure any two browsers interpret and apply the same @font-face rule in a compatible manner then none of this conversation has any purpose. 

I do, of course, see the benefit as far as the CSS feature is concerned. 
When a user agent fails to fetch a resource because it voluntarily follows optional protocol restrictions – and other browsers succeed because of different policy or design decisions – that is about the same as implementing a certain transport protocol [version] or not, i.e. HTTP, HTTPS, FILE, DATA or what have you. This is clearly outside the scope of a styling language.

>> CSS Fonts ⊊ Web Fonts
> We won't agree on that.

That seems so, therefore this will be my last mail on the topic.

> If the origin of the document had an impact on whether or not a background-image loaded I'd want to see that normatively defined in Backgrounds & Borders as well, even if the actual mechanism is specified elsewhere.

Reminds me of that “print background” thread.

> while the policy is exchanged at a layer that is orthogonal to CSS Fonts, the decision to apply that policy is part of the feature.

I would be somewhat more okay with CSS – or rather all W3C specifications – applying origin rules to all resources, although I still believe that direct linking is one of the core principles of the Web, even if – and maybe also a little bit because – it collides with some business models.

JFTR, I also find it strange that CSS says this about relative URIs in ‘url()’:

  For CSS style sheets, the base URI is that of the style sheet, not that of the source document.

but the Fonts module ED has this text:

  The origin of the stylesheet containing @font-face rules is not used when deciding 
  whether a font is same origin or not, only the origin of the containing document is used.

Received on Thursday, 21 July 2011 10:04:32 UTC