RE: Reporting my findings on MIME types (action 120)

Media types registration is managed by the IANA (IETF), so ISO has no say as to what types can / must be registered. (I wish it was ISO, would've been easier to deal with, IMO.)

I think that the success of the new attempt will largely rest on our ability to reason/justify why the new top-level type is needed, why currently registered "application" tree sub-types are deficient and what will be the advantages of going through the effort of establishing a new top-level "font" type. I suspect that once we produce a solid, convincing story as to why we want to do it - the technicalities of the process will be easy to manage, and the outcome will to significant degree depend on whether IETF folks see the value / need in this new media type.

Thank you,
Vlad


From: David Kuettel [mailto:kuettel@google.com]
Sent: Wednesday, October 23, 2013 9:30 AM
To: Joe Vieira
Cc: Levantovsky, Vladimir; public-webfonts-wg@w3.org Group
Subject: Re: Reporting my findings on MIME types (action 120)

On Wed, Oct 23, 2013 at 6:12 AM, Joe Vieira <joe@myfonts.com<mailto:joe@myfonts.com>> wrote:
Vlad thanks for digging those up, good reading. The 2009 draft is a pretty reasonable looking draft, it seems like it was simply before it's time.

I would be in favor of modifying and resubmitting.

David, I'm happy to help gather some data about MIME type issues, and assist in anyway I can. I am curious what data we think is collectable / worth collecting about the problems.

Thank you Joe!  It would be great to collaborate on this front.

At this moment, I am unsure of what data would win the ISO organization over.  Perhaps however, data along the lines of: the number of web pages using web fonts along with an estimation of the % of integrations serving the font with the wrong (or non-optimal) mime-type.

Defining the scope of the issue does seem to make sense as then we would be working to solve a tangible issue.

Joe

On Wed, Oct 23, 2013 at 8:43 AM, David Kuettel <kuettel@google.com<mailto:kuettel@google.com>> wrote:
Thank you Vlad, this is incredibly helpful!

What would you suggest as a next step for us?  Should we explore resubmitting the earlier proposals, submitting new ones, or first gathering hard data on how widespread the problem is?

Gathering the data could take time (esp. as we would need to prioritize it among all of our other outstanding projects), but perhaps could make all of the difference this time around.

On Tue, Oct 22, 2013 at 12:42 PM, Levantovsky, Vladimir <Vladimir.Levantovsky@monotype.com<mailto:Vladimir.Levantovsky@monotype.com>> wrote:
Folks,

I was able to dig up some old stuff on MIME type registration for fonts. The last attempt to register a top-level "font" type was initiated in 2004 with the draft submitted by David Singer (see attached), needless to say that it failed and the efforts were abandoned c.a. 2007. In the end of 2008 the WebFonts WG has prepared filing for "application/font-woff" type which has been registered as soon as WOFF 1.0 spec went to PR (I think), and in 2009 I put together a draft (attached) for "application/font-sfnt" type (as part of ISO/IEC 14496-22 OFF amendment) that was registered in 2012 once the ISO amendment was finalized.

There was a discussion in 2012 specific about media type registrations in general (and "font" as a top-level type in particular) on the IETF reflector (I believe it was Martin Dürst who raised the issue at that time) that kind of prompted the discussion about font types and it was hinted that the condition are now more favorable to having a new top level type registered, but nothing has been done since then. Martin and I had an off-list conversation about preparing the new draft for top level font registration but we didn't get to actually doing it.

I believe this is really it, I heard there had been prior attempts to register font MIME types in the past but I have not been able to find anything else on the subject.

Thank you,
Vlad