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

* Sylvain Galineau wrote:
>It would certainly be helpful to discuss specific examples and use-cases in order
>to understand where the issue concretely lies vs. abstract generalities like 'devices'
>or 'implementations' which guarantee people will think of those implementations and
>devices they *know*. But it seems I'm crazy for thinking we should have a chance to
>discuss such specifics and use-cases *before* we get to the FO stage.

CSS 2.0 was the last specification for font loading from style sheets
with community support. As far as I am aware it did not prohibit re-
referencing fonts across "origins" and it did not require support for
"CORS". If you want to prohibit font references across origins and re-
quire "CORS", then you have to persuade the community that that's the
way to go.

If you need something specific, let's say I have a little tool that
implements css3-fonts and some other CSS features and a markup language
and it renders the styled documents into a bitmap. Has all sorts of
limitations, for instance, it only supports UTF-8 even though browsers
do support many other character encodings and the only font format my
tool supports is not supported by any browser. My tool does currently
load cross-origin fonts and supports HTTP of course.

If I change my tool so it no longer loads cross-origin fonts then that
might break stuff for my existing users when they upgrade. Seems I have
more work and my users more problems. I could also implement the CORS
specification, but that is even more work for me and more work for my
users because they have to change their servers and so on.

The question isn't what kind of use cases I have in mind, the question
is rather why my tool cannot be css3-fonts compliant if I don't feel
like making these adjustments, and so far I've seen no reason for that.

If you cannot explain why all css3-fonts implementations must do this,
then you will have a hard time convincing The Director to keep the re-
quirement for all implementations as it is.

(I actually do offer tools like that and do get regular user feedback
about web fonts not working for one reason or another, they are just
not quite as limited as in the example above, and don't really matter
in this discussion.)
-- 
Björn Höhrmann · mailto:bjoern@hoehrmann.de · http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de
Am Badedeich 7 · Telefon: +49(0)160/4415681 · http://www.bjoernsworld.de
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Received on Wednesday, 29 June 2011 20:28:15 UTC