Re: WOFF and extended metadata

I'd like to present a developed version of my suggestion of May 28, which again uses key-value pairs and avoids Sylvain's group concept.

Some idea of the extensibility of key-value pairs may be gained from a glimpse in the direction of OpenStreetMap. This open-source project aims to represent the geography of the entire world, including natural features, man-made objects ... all the way down to shop opening hours and zoo cage contents. Demonstrating their adaptability, key-value pairs are used throughout. Language is denoted by a simple colon syntax on the key; non-English for key names is discouraged outside of features only relevant locally. Here an example of multilingual representations (key=value) of a street name:

name=朝阳公园南路
name:zh=朝阳公园南路
name:en=Chaoyang Park South Road
name:zh_py=Chaoyanggongyuan Nanlu
name:zh_pyt=Cháoyánggōngyuán Nánlù

I offer the following example of representing multilingual font credit information, data that in a from-scratch WOFF metadata implementation might be represented this way, along with some font usage recommendation data.

<tag k="credit" v="Matthew Carter">
 <tag k="date" v="2004"/> 
 <tag k="role" v="outlines"/>
 <tag k="role:fr" v="lignes qui définent la forme de la glyphe"/>
</tag>

<tag k="credit" v="Tom Rickner">
 <tag k="date" v="2004"/>
 <tag k="role" v="hints"/>
 <tag k="role:fr" v="suggestions pour la rasterization"/>
</tag>

<tag k="size-recommendation" v="print">
 <tag k="pt-size-min" v="24"/>
 <tag k="value:fr" v="imprimé"/>
</tag>

<tag k="size-recommendation" v="screen">
 <tag k="ppem-size-min" v="18"/>
 <tag k="ppem-size-max" v="200"/>
 <tag k="value:fr" v="à l’écran"/>
</tag>

The way OpenStreetMap handles new tags is to maintain on the web two lists of tags: standard features and proposed features. Once there's consensus over how one should use the keys and values of a proposed tag (e.g. 'gate', 'shop'), authors of map renderers start to incorporate it into their code. Likewise, the W3C or some delegated group would maintain such lists for WOFF tags, describing recommended construction and handling of, for example, the 'size-recommendation' and 'credit' tag structures. Standard translations for common values can be stored on these pages too, intended to be stored inside UAs, reducing the proliferation of language strings.

Not sure whether to allow arbitrary nesting...

- L

Received on Wednesday, 9 June 2010 17:27:14 UTC