RE: Fonts WG Charter feedback

>-----Original Message-----
>From: Jonathan Kew [mailto:jonathan@jfkew.plus.com]


>On 1 Jul 2009, at 02:37, Levantovsky, Vladimir wrote:
>
>> I want to say that I absolutely support with both hands what Thomas
>> has proposed.
>> I also think there is also a way to merge this and Jonathan's
>> proposal so that we would get "wrapped(compressed(X))", which is
>> both useful as a generic wrapper format and provides real tangible
>> benefits for both authors and users.
>
>It is not yet clear to me what "real tangible benefits" are provided
>by wrapping fonts, given that fonts can already carry whatever
>metadata you wish to include.
>
>Perhaps the day will come when all web resources are delivered in a
>standard "wrapper", so that user agents can access and display
>information about them without having to read format-specific elements
>from the resource itself, whether that means the 'name' table in a
>font, the Exif tags in an image, the DocInfo dictionary of a PDF file,
>etc. If that is the goal, though, it should be addressed in a much
>broader context than this group.
>
>JK
>
Ascender's proposal does not wrap anything. EOT did for compression purposes, as well as to
embed a root string for same-origin check purposes (the feature some renamed 'DRM').

The goal and benefit are web font interoperability across all browsers and enabling
authors to use any font licensed for web use, whether free or commercial. Compared
to the current situation, this is *very* tangible !

And yes, this is well beyond the scope of this mailing list (and group). Such an effort
could also take a substantial amount of time to specify and deploy compared to a focused lightweight alternative.
I personally do not want to see the 'perfect' or ideal generic solution delay the good working one.
We certainly hear from web authors about typography, and they identify it as a real problem.
This is more of a solution to an entire class of problems, of which we hear little about afaik.

Received on Wednesday, 1 July 2009 15:08:06 UTC