WebFonts WG Kick-off (was RE: WOFF submission published)

Hello WG,

First of all, I would like to thank the authors of the WOFF Submission for completing this major and very important milestone, which enables us to proceed with technical work according the group charter [1]. I also would like to thank John Hudson for initiating the discussion on the Typophile blog [2], and I have to say that I certainly share his sentiment about those rare circumstances when using bold typeface is totally appropriate ;)

Now that we have the WG fully formed (with Christopher Slye from Adobe being the newest member of the group, welcome) we should start thinking of the many tasks we have to accomplish. To start the creative thinking process, I would like to suggest a list of items for consideration, and I would encourage all of you to add items to the list as you see appropriate. In no particular order, other than maybe the complexity of things we need to address, I believe we should:

1) Discuss and finalize the WOFF specification
   - are there any features that we believe may be missing, or would be useful to add in order to make WOFF "future-proof"?
   - what is the metadata information that we believe would be good for browsers to expose to users, and whether the existing metadata fields would be sufficient to convey the information we want to see exposed?

2) Decide on the conformance requirements:
   - whether any references to same-origin restrictions and the CORS mechanism to relax them should be part of the WOFF spec, or 
   - whether it should be a separate deliverable from the group, and
   - whether this should be part of the conformance requirements.

3) Develop Web Font conformance spec (see details in the WG charter [1])

4) Develop test cases for web fonts:
   - develop test methodology and decide whether it is appropriate to require the presence of human observer, at least for some test cases;
   - develop the test cases and design / collect / donate / acquire (as we see appropriate) the necessary resources for web font test suite (e.g. fonts, etc.).

For the time being, I intentionally omitted items related to implementations from this initial list - I believe that the fact that WOFF submission has originated from three major browser vendors speaks for itself, and will allow us to address the implementation requirements later as part of our work.

We also need to finalize our conference call schedule. So far, I believe the latest proposal has been to hold weekly conference calls on Wednesday, alternating the call times to accommodate time zone differences between different continents as follows:

US West Coast - 07:00
US East Coast - 10:00
Central Europe - 16:00
Japan - 23:00

and

US West Coast - 13:00
US East Coast - 16:00
Central Europe - 22:00
Japan - 05:00

I would like to ask for your final "vote" for this proposed conf. call schedule. 
(Question to Chris Lilley - does W3C have conference bridge we should use, or should we find a sponsor for this?)

As a reminder, all proceedings of this WG is public information, and the messages sent to the list can be found in WG email archive [3].


Thank you and best regards,
Vladimir


[1] http://www.w3.org/2009/08/WebFonts/charter.html
[2] http://typophile.com/node/69631
[3] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-webfonts-wg/



> -----Original Message-----
> From: public-webfonts-wg-request@w3.org [mailto:public-webfonts-wg-
> request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Chris Lilley
> Sent: Monday, April 19, 2010 3:47 PM
> To: public-webfonts-wg@w3.org
> Subject: WOFF submission published
> 
> Hello public-webfonts-wg,
> 
> I'm pleased to announce that the WOFF File Format 1.0 Submission [1]
> has just been published. The Submission was made by  Microsoft
> Corporation, Mozilla Foundation and Opera Software ASA, all of whom are
> members of this WG.
> 
> The Staff comment [2] was easy to write, as this Working Group already
> exists. The actual specification is at [3] and again, I'm pleased to
> note that all the authors are members of this WG.
> 
> We can now get on with our technical work.
> 
> 
> [1] http://www.w3.org/Submission/2010/03/
> [2] http://www.w3.org/Submission/2010/03/Comment/
> [3] http://www.w3.org/Submission/WOFF/
> 
> --
>  Chris Lilley                    mailto:chris@w3.org
>  Technical Director, Interaction Domain
>  W3C Graphics Activity Lead
>  Co-Chair, W3C Hypertext CG
>

Received on Tuesday, 20 April 2010 21:06:57 UTC