RE: WOFF and extended metadata

> From: www-font-request@w3.org [mailto:www-font-request@w3.org] On
> Behalf Of Levantovsky, Vladimir


> The purpose of this sentence is to provide specify recommended behavior,
> "MAY" has a completely different meaning.

"MAY" is appropriate. The vast, vast majority of browser users will *never* 
look at this information. Ever. I don't think browser vendors should have
to justify not implementing such a specialized metadata feature, yet 
SHOULD implicitly requires them to do just that since it is recommended. 

Fonts will still carry your metadata. Web authors will still want to access
it. Browser vendors should be free to expose it in whatever way they wish,
be it as a built-in dialog or an API exposed for applications and add-ons,
or both. Most importantly for the format's adoption, they should be able to 
implement this *when* they wish.

Summary: 1) this block is optional, 2) the invalidity of its content has no 
effect on the runtime use of the font data thus 3) recommending a UI mechanism 
here is toothless in practice, which means that 4) making this a SHOULD will 
likely result in most browsers being both non-conformant and interoperable. 
I don't think that's an interesting result from a standardization standpoint.
 
If the metadata format is simple and extensible, we're definitely interested in 
supporting this eventually. But that is unlikely to be a priority in the first 
release that supports WOFF i.e. whether the lack of font metadata info UI makes us 
non-conformant with respect to WOFF will be up to web authors. That would make it
a MAY.

Received on Tuesday, 25 May 2010 21:47:12 UTC