Re: Minutes, 16 February 2011 WebFonts WG telcon

On Feb 19, 2011, at 10:18 PM, Dave Crossland wrote:

> I suspect proprietary font vendors will still sell WOFF files without
> SOR at all if push comes to shove. However, appeasement seems like the
> gentlemanly thing; the WOFF charter _was_ approved with mention of
> SOR, and so if the WOFF Recommendation mentions FO and says nothing
> about CORS, that sounds good to me, and if it says nothing about FO or
> CORS, its not meeting its charter to deal with SOR.

If we want to finely parse the charter, here's what it actually says:

2.1 Recommendation-track Deliverables

*WOFF specification*
    WOFF format, by Jonathan Kew (Mozilla Corporation), Tal Leming (Type Supply), and Erik van Blokland (LettError), emerged as a strong favourite for the medium and longer term.

*WebFont conformance specification*
    This specification will reference the font formats in existing use (OpenType, WOFF, SVG, and EOT), the font referencing and linking specifications (in both CSS and XML serialisations), access policies such as same-origin and CORS, and define which linking mechanisms, policies and formats are required for compliance. WOFF will be the required format for compliance, the others being optional. The Working Group will decide whether to make the formats and linking mechanisms normative references or, on the other hand, produce a document citable by other specifications (CSS3 Fonts, XSL, SVG) when claiming conformance.

<http://www.w3.org/2009/08/WebFonts/charter.html>



So the Web Fonts charter does not make any mention of including a same-origin restriction in the WOFF format, and merely mentions it as an example of a possible access policy for the "WebFont conformance specification" that apparently never came to be. It could be argued that CSS3 Fonts can take the place of such a specification.


I think it would be ungentlemanly to try to argue that it's out of charter for the WOFF spec itself to define linking restrictions. But it also seems incorrect to argue that such restrictions have to be included to meet the charter. The charter never suggested such restrictions would be in the WOFF file format spec.

Regards,
MAciej

Received on Sunday, 20 February 2011 06:28:31 UTC