RE: WOFF without same origin restriction in Opera?

[John Hudson:] 
> I agree, and again thank you for steering this somewhere more productive.
> One of the things that I find unsettling -- upsetting even
> -- about Opera ignoring the SOR requirement is that it seems a big step
> backwards to the sometimes less than friendly arguments of *two* summers
> ago, which invites the unhappy tone you diagnosed in my message. I really
> thought we were past that, had been working well together, and were close
> to a broadly uncontroversial web font standard with clearly defined
> conformance requirements for both font producers and consumers.
> So seeing Opera apparently choose to ignore one of the conformance
> requirements of the specification that they co-sponsored is perplexing and
> contrary to expectations of where we are and the good will that got us
> here.

In fairness Anne was always consistent in his opposition to this part of the
spec. So I would have been surprised if Opera had come around. We also never 
heard anything in clear support of this requirement from WebKit so the risk 
of one or two implementors skipping SOR was high and very real all along.

It's definitely puzzling given Opera's original, purely technical stand that 
there shouldn't be a dedicated font packaging format at all. Once you've 
decided that you'll do the pragmatic thing after all, why not do it right ? 
What is gained by sticking to your guns on this one piece ? And if Opera's 
WOFF support were solely about browser interoperability - i.e. "Screw the 
foundries but we have to match Firefox and IE to compete" - then it makes 
even less sense to leave out a feature supported by both existing 
implementations. I don't really get it.

But then when individuals who are so openly opposed to Microsoft and the
dominant ways of its past can feel so completely comfortable telling an 
entire industry to either play by their preferred rules or get 'fucked' 
without spotting the massive irony in the mirror, asking for full-on
pragmatism may be a bridge too far. 

The pragmatic answer imo is to compare what we do have - WOFF in the 
four major browsers - vs. what we don't quite have - SOR in 2 out of 4 - 
and consider that the two that do implement SOR have a far bigger market 
share than those that don't. Then decide whether that's enough and move 
on. I think it's more than enough.
 
I'm still hoping Opera will prove me wrong. Same with WebKit. But given the 
history thus far I'm not really counting on it. As much as we all like to 
pretend otherwise, all browser vendors decide what to implement based on their 
own interests as they perceive them. Or their lack of interest, in this case. 

Shocking, I know.

Received on Wednesday, 26 January 2011 04:39:57 UTC