the truth which dare not speak it's name

Yes, this does get to a very specific technical
issue.   The intro is for fun and mood setting.

Some street person I'd never seen before
passed through our neighborhood today, collecting
cans and bottles from the recycling cans at
various apartments.   

I got to talking with him about this and that.  I was
saying something about a big stash of recyclable plastic
bottles he could nab.   Turns out he knew about those already
but while we were talking I took a step backwards.  I took
a step backwards but misjudged where the curb started and
tripped myself up.  Fell flat on my ass but not just that.
Landing on my ass momentum carried me further and, in a 
split second, I bonked the back of my head against the
cement sidewalk.   Ouch.

I came up "seeing stars".  No, really, I know what people
mean by that now.  I wasn't quite knocked out but
I was pretty "out" and, because it was what was on my
mind, I started talking to this street guy about the 
whole "web font" issue.  Yeah, sure, he was a down and out
recycling scavenger but he quickly got the gist.

First he satisfied himself that I would fully come to,
which in my opinion was mighty gentlemanly.  It was
a pretty hard knock on the head but I wasn't bleeding
or anything and I hadn't quite passed out from it.

Next he remarked on how the bump I was about to see raised
on my head was nothing compared to the half of his face
all swollen up from a nasty fist-fight.  He could feel me,
so to speak, but for him this kind of injury was pretty
routine, sadly.

Well, I rambled on a bit basically recounting the past few weeks 
of mailing list discussion and he listened and once or twice
nodded.  And he came up with this:

"Listen, you goofy boy, everyone you're telling me about
can begrudgingly agree to a Recommendation that requires
both TTF/OTF AND some variation on EOT-lite.  The EOT-lite
part makes sense because, done correctly,  it allows 
interop with already deployed versions of IE.  In an imaginary
paradise nobody would need EOT-lite but, here on earth, it's
the only way to get web fonts to a helluva lot of existing
users so it's quite fair to write that into a standard. "

I was pissed about this because that solution doesn't result
in triumph for my "wrapper" idea but, as the stars cleared
after my bump on the head - I realized he had a point.

Proposition:  The web font standard shall require that 
conforming implementations support:

EOT-lite: details to be hashed out but, minimally,
compatible with IE EOT support disregarding rootstrings 
and other forms of "protection".

AND

TTF/OTF: what all the other browsers already do.

aside: CORS for linked fonts is a good idea and appears to be
relatively uncontroversial.

-t

Received on Wednesday, 8 July 2009 02:06:29 UTC