RE: Fonts WG Charter feedback

 

 

From: rocallahan@gmail.com [mailto:rocallahan@gmail.com] On Behalf Of Robert O'Callahan
Sent: Monday, June 29, 2009 11:51 PM
To: Levantovsky, Vladimir
Cc: Thomas Lord; John Daggett; www-font
Subject: Re: Fonts WG Charter feedback

 

On Tue, Jun 30, 2009 at 3:34 PM, Levantovsky, Vladimir <Vladimir.Levantovsky@monotypeimaging.com> wrote:

 I believe that the rationale for "EOT Lite" proposal is to create an

 easily implementable unified solution for font linking that enables web
 authors address millions (or billions) of users in a shortest possible
 period of time. I understand where you are coming from but, from a
 pragmatic point of view, I find "EOT Lite" proposal very practical. It
 eliminates all the concerns (such as root strings and font-specific
 compression) browser vendors expressed earlier, and creates a wrapper
 format that is easy to implement yet is backward compatible with older
 IE versions (which means we are not going to disenfranchise users who
 are still using those older IE browsers).

 

We've already discussed the grave problems with this approach:
-- If you want to serve a single font file to all browsers then it's hard to deploy because you need Referer checking, and it's unreliable because many users behind firewalls will not get the fonts.
-- The possibility of rootstrings being present and honoured by some but not all browsers is an interop minefield, one that we'd be stuck with forever. It doesn't matter if your spec says they are uninterpreted bytes; some browsers interpret those bytes.

 

I am afraid we may be talking about different things here. “EOT Lite” proposal is different from EOT version 1.0 we discussed earlier – it doesn’t have root strings, so there is no possibility for them being present to a browser, and it doesn’t assume any particular way of implementing access control, so same-origin restrictions and CORS would work with it just fine.



It's simpler and better for there to be two formats for the interim, have authors serve two font files, and in the long run converge on the new format.

 

With the problem being that the majority of fonts today cannot be licensed for such use. It makes it very important for us to converge on the new format sooner rather than later, and I would ask you to take another look and consider if either “EOT Lite” or Thomas Lord “generic wrapper” proposal would be something you can support.

 

Regards,

Vladimir

 



Rob
-- 
"He was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed. We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all." [Isaiah 53:5-6]