RE: Fonts WG Charter feedback

On Monday, June 29, 2009 5:13 PM Håkon Wium Lie wrote:
> 
> Also sprach Sylvain Galineau:
> 
>  > "If, say, web fonts are successful in five years, let's reconsider."
> 
>  > Why should we wait five more years ? All browsers support web fonts
>  > in one way or another. Why should the web accept five more years of
>  > font format fragmentation?
> 
> By making a new format, you increase the risk of format fragmentation.
> If you have n formats and create a new format to replace the other
> ones, you have n + 1 formats.
> 

I disagree. We know from the history of fonts that back in early nineties we witnessed the "font format" wars on desktop: Type 1 vs. TTF. It could have been going on until now, but the reality is that different parties agreed to sit at the round table, and the new "OpenType" format with exciting new features has emerged. The new format didn't appear out of vacuum - created as a superset of TTF, it gradually replaced Type 1 fonts but gave birth to new feature-rich OpenType CFF fonts. So the simple math doesn't work here, it's much more likely that n + 1 = 1

>  > "If Microsoft does not make that interoperability commitment, they
>  > should not be rewarded with a new Font WG."
> 
>  > Please. This is not and should not be about Microsoft or any
>  > individual browser vendor's own narrow interests. Interoperability
>  > is yours to uphold too. Hundreds of millions of users run an
>  > EOT-compatible browser. Why should they get screwed ?
> 
> Are you saying that the new format must be backwards compatible
> with deployed versions of IE?
> 
>  > We accept it's not up to us to pick the outcome; and if that means
>  > dumping EOT, so be it.
> 
> And replacing it with a backwards-compatible format, I presume?
> Otherwise, users would be equally "screwed", no?

And if you and I do care about authors (as you indicated in your ATypI presentation), than backward-compatible solution that can be implemented and deployed fast and with minimal efforts should be our first priority. I am sure this can be accomplished easily if we just put our political differences aside and concentrate on solving a task at hand. This is why I brought up the idea of using EOT version 1.0 (with no URL root strings) as a basis, or we can consider a new backward-compatible approach based on the new Ascender proposal of "EOT Lite" solution [1] that can be the easiest and fastest way to solve the webfonts issues once and for all.


Regards,
Vladimir

[1] http://blog.fontembedding.com/post/2009/06/29/Revised-Web-Fonts-Proposal.aspx

> 
> -h&kon
>               Håkon Wium Lie                          CTO °þe®ª
> howcome@opera.com                  http://people.opera.com/howcome

Received on Monday, 29 June 2009 22:11:34 UTC