Re: Cross-WG Collaboration: Procedural Fonts for PM-KR CG (Building on WOFF Legacy)

Hi Chris,

Thank you for bringing this to the WebFonts WG and for your candid response.

I owe you and the group a clarification — my original email was poorly 
framed. PM-KR is not proposing changes to WOFF, OpenType, or any part of 
the web font delivery ecosystem.

We don't work on font formats or font transfer. Your chartered scope on 
Incremental Font Transfer and WOFF maintenance is exactly the kind of 
focused, well-defined work we respect.


What I should have communicated more clearly is what PM-KR actually does 
at the intersection with fonts: we represent the knowledge about 
characters and glyphs — their construction, semantic meaning across 
languages, and relationships to other symbols — as structured procedural 
data.

This is a knowledge representation layer, not a font format. Our 
reference implementation consumes standard fonts and produces standard 
glyphs. We build on top of the ecosystem your group maintains.


I was reaching out not to propose changes to your work, but to learn 
from the WebFonts WG's deep expertise — particularly around multi-script 
character semantics and the subsetting intelligence behind IFT, which 
relates to how PM-KR organizes character knowledge across writing systems.

I framed that poorly as "collaboration" when I should have simply asked 
for guidance.


I understand this falls outside your charter, and I accept the group's 
decision. If a natural touchpoint ever arises — particularly around the 
multi-script and internationalization aspects of IFT — we'd welcome the 
conversation.

But there is no ask here.


Thank you again for your time and for the foundational work on web fonts.

Best regards,
Daniel Ramos
Co-Chair, W3C PM-KR Community Group
On 3/12/26 12:56 PM, Chris Lilley wrote:
>
> Daniel,
>
> Thanks for your interest in web fonts.
>
> The potential collaboration that you propose was discussed at the 12 
> March WebFonts WG call [1].
>
> The objectives and use cases for this proposed radical retooling of a 
> well established ecosystem are unclear, and the costs of such 
> retooling do not seem to have been considered. However, even had the 
> potential benefits and costs been more clearly expressed, the proposed 
> work falls well outside the chartered scope [2] of this Working Group 
> and thus, we must respectfully decline the proposed collaboration.
>
> [1] https://www.w3.org/2026/03/12-webfonts-minutes.html#cbaa
> [2] https://www.w3.org/2025/03/webfonts-wg.html#scope
>
> On 2026-03-03 14:52, Daniel Ramos wrote:
>>
>> Hi Chris,
>>
>> I'm Daniel Ramos, Co-Chair of the W3C Procedural Memory Knowledge 
>> Representation (PM-KR) Community Group, reaching out to explore 
>> collaboration between PM-KR and the Web Fonts Working Group — 
>> building on your groundbreaking work with @font-face and WOFF.
>>
>> Background: PM-KR develops procedural knowledge representation where 
>> fonts, symbols, and typography are stored as executable programs 
>> rather than static files. This is the natural evolution of WOFF's 
>> vision: universal font solutions for the web.
>>
> -- 
> Chris Lilley
> @svgeesus@mastodon.scot
> W3C Distinguished Expert, Color, Graphics & Fonts
> W3C Technical Programming Team, Core Web Design