Re: Fonts WG Charter feedback

On Fri, Jul 3, 2009 at 6:18 PM, Thomas Phinney<tphinney@cal.berkeley.edu> wrote:
> I'm not so sure about that. Or more precisely, everyone or almost
> everyone agrees with your statement as worded, but as there's no
> agreement on the definition of "interoperable" (based on the arguments
> we've seen here), there isn't really agreement in practice. Certainly
> I don't agree for some of the definitions of "interoperable" that some
> folks here have been using.

I think everyone agrees that ideally, it would be possible for authors
to put up one font file and have all browsers use it.

> There you are completely incorrect.
>
> There's demand for $10 blu-ray players, too. That doesn't mean the
> makers of those devices will be forced to provide them at that price.
> There's demand for all sorts of things that it doesn't make economic
> sense for people to provide.

Well, okay.  Let me restate that: a number of the people here who do
believe that proliferation of commercial fonts on the web would be
valuable, do not believe the font foundries when they say they won't
provide them in an undesirable format when push comes to shove.  I.e.,
a number of people believe what I wrote.  Regardless of whether
they're correct or not, it means that these people don't care very
much about what font foundries say their requirements are, since they
don't believe they'll hold in practice.  This is therefore a further
reason why I think a lot of people here are focusing on the browser
vendors' requirements, not the font vendors' (except insofar as
Microsoft backs the font vendors).

> Nobody? I'm not so sure about that. If this stuff was being widely
> used, and Chrome didn't support it, I'd stop using Chrome.

But if there was no agreed-upon format, authors would just provide
both, so there would be no direct penalty to users.  Thus, the
browsers don't directly annoy their users in this case.

Received on Friday, 3 July 2009 23:03:55 UTC