RE: Fonts WG Charter feedback

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Levantovsky, Vladimir
> [mailto:Vladimir.Levantovsky@MonotypeImaging.com]
> Sent: Wednesday, July 01, 2009 1:33 PM
> To: Sylvain Galineau; Håkon Wium Lie
> Cc: www-font@w3.org
> Subject: RE: Fonts WG Charter feedback
>
> In my experience, any optional part of the spec immediately introduces
> interoperability issue. If we want to enable compression as an option
> for web authors to choose - all UA implementations must support it,
> otherwise it's not really an option.
>
> Vladimir

Agreed, of course. It would not be optional for implementers but optional for authors. This of course assumes the compression were not done lower in the stack. On this count, I'm torn. As a developer at heart, I'd rather punt it 'downstairs' to HTTP. From John's numbers, the delta, while measurable, seems affordable to *me*. But once high-latency scenarios and non-PC devices are involved that difference may add up. In those cases though, maybe it is reasonable to expect user agents - whether on phones or PCs - to provide the option to ignore web fonts and what the default is. I would also expect sites aimed at users with low-speed connection to avoid web fonts. It's not like they have to use them.

For those sites who want to use large CJK web fonts, the question is whether a font-specific compression scheme is really going to be so much better than generic protocol compression and standard subsetting techniques over the next decade to be worth the extra design and implementation costs. I'm pretty confident coming to an agreement will take less work without a dedicated compression solution than with it. But we must to take the compression use-cases into consideration regardless.

Received on Wednesday, 1 July 2009 20:49:04 UTC