Re: Last call comments on WOFF

On Wednesday 26 January 2011 02:57:57 Levantovsky, Vladimir wrote:

> Can you please provide specific references to those parts of the spec
> that you believe the comment is relevant to? AS it is, the comment
> seems to be rather general and it is not clear on what particular
> changes you would like to see in the spec.

One possibility is to remove some sentences from the Introduction and 
instead add a new, short section, as follows.

UAs should not have to know via what protocol or from what IP address 
they retrieved the WOFF file. Indeed, the file may not have come from a 
single server (e.g., with bittorrent or Freenet) or not from any server 
at all (if it was "retrieved" from a URN). Specifically, that means 
that in the 4th paragraph of the Introduction all but the 1st sentence 
must be dropped, or replaced with something else. That something else 
could be, e.g., "UAs must implement the provisions of the xyz block."

And then a new section between sections 7 and 8 defines that xyz block.

One particularly powerful format for that block could be the POWDER[1] 
grouping syntax ("<iriset>"). It is a bit verbose for tying the WOFF 
file to a single document, but quite efficient for associating the file 
with large sets of documents.

The new section could thus contain something like this:

    The xyz block
    -------------

    The WOFF file may include at most one xyz block. If the block
    exists, it must contain compressed text, that, once uncompressed,
    is a POWDER[ref] entity.

    UAs must only use the font in the WOFF file to render documents
    that, according to this POWDER entity, have a w:apply property,
    where w stands for the RDF Namespace http://www.w3.org/[TBD].

    If a WOFF file has no xyz block, UAs must act as if it contained the
    following xyz block:

        <powder xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2007/05/powder#" 
                xmlns:w="http://www.w3.org/[TBD]">
         <dr>
          <iriset><includeiripattern>*</includeiripattern></iriset>
          <descriptorset><w:apply/></descriptorset>
         </dr>
        </powder>

(If necessary, and depending on how many future extensions to this block 
are expected, it can be abbreviated. E.g., one or more of the outer 
levels of elements can be omitted, even to the point that just the 
children of <iriset> remain:

    <includeiripattern>*</includeiripattern>

In fact, I already omitted the <attribution> element, which POWDER 
requires.)

I know it is late to add new functionality, especially as I expect you 
have already looked at this, though probably not with the same syntax. 
Nevertheless, I think it is extremely important to keep technologies, 
and especially protocol levels, independent, because it will be 
difficult to fix WOFF later, when, e.g., people want to use it on other 
platforms than HTTP.

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/2009/REC-powder-grouping-20090901/



Bert
-- 
  Bert Bos                                ( W 3 C ) http://www.w3.org/
  http://www.w3.org/people/bos                               W3C/ERCIM
  bert@w3.org                             2004 Rt des Lucioles / BP 93
  +33 (0)4 92 38 76 92            06902 Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France

Received on Wednesday, 26 January 2011 15:27:01 UTC