Re: WOFF and extended metadata

On Saturday, May 22, 2010, 5:32:22 AM, Sylvain wrote:

SG> I'm perfectly fine with having metadata. I think everyone is.
SG> But rejecting the font when something is wrong with it seems unreasonable.
SG> Real-world experience with other formats also indicates this will not work
SG> in practice.

For one thing, the metadata is optional. So if

- fonts with no metadata work
- fonts with metadata sometimes work and sometimes dont (especially if this varies by browser)

this will merely result in blogs explaining that you should always strip out the metadata from a font because it makes it more reliable.

I assume we don't want that.

Thus

- a WOFF can optionally contain metadata
- whether it does or does not, the rendering of the font data extracted from the WOFF is unaffected
- optionally, and at user request, the metadata can be examined by the user agent (e.g. displayed to the user or made available to some API)
- if that happens *and* the metadata is not well formed or does not contain the expected elements, then the API and the display will likely give the same result as if there had been no metadata there.



-- 
 Chris Lilley                    mailto:chris@w3.org
 Technical Director, Interaction Domain
 W3C Graphics Activity Lead
 Co-Chair, W3C Hypertext CG

Received on Saturday, 22 May 2010 10:34:05 UTC