Tuesday July 25th Web Fonts Working Group meeting

Web fonts folks -

I expect Vladimir will send out an agenda shortly, but since we're scheduling an extra hour for the July 25th meeting, here's a bit more detail about it:

The upcoming meeting of the web fonts working group will be primarily taken up by a presentation on a new "Binned Incremental Font Transfer" prototype developed by Adobe. The extra hour is to allow for questions and discussion.

IFTB is, in effect, a pair of font formats, one differing slightly from OTF and one slightly from WOFF2. Each includes an added table that assigns glyphs to independent "bins". The path data for glyphs in a bin can be integrated by downloading a corresponding "chunk" file.

Compared with previous solutions IFTB probably shares the most in common with static subsetting, but avoids the "fragmentation" inherent to that system. As with patch-subset, a user should get the same results as if they downloaded the original font.

Adobe believes the new system meets the same primary use cases as the current (and somewhat stalled) Range Request protocol, those being:

  1.  Operating with a minimal server-side (i.e. conventional HTTP facilities but no custom code), and
  2.  High compatibility with CDN caching

It also feels that the overall costs and benefits of IFTB will be superior to those of Range Request.

The purpose of this presentation is to familiarize the working group with the basics of this system and its relevant benefits, to help prepare for a future evaluation of whether it makes sense to replace the Range Request specification with some version of this new option.

Skef Iterum