Re: Questions re web-fonts

On Wednesday 08 July 2009, karsten luecke wrote:
> Christopher Fynn wrote:

> > Users want fonts that work seamlessly [...]
>
> Erik van Blokland and John Hudson have given good answers.
> TTF/OTF fonts per se (possible permission tables or embedding bits
> aside) ideally would work in all kinds of environments.

I have the secret ambition (no longer secret now :-) ) to do such a good 
job on the structure and extensibility of the new font format's 
metadata, that the format works equally well over all protocols and all 
transports: FTP, e-mail, news, bittorrent, bluetooth, etc. And that 
includes "no protocol," i.e., local files.

Behind that is another hope: if it works for protocols from the past, 
there is a good chance it'll work with protocols in the future. (I hope 
that HTTP-bis[1] will extend the life of HTTP by many years, but I 
don't want to rely on that.)

There is no shortage of competition for the metadata, though: The PLING 
(W3C's Policy Language INterest Group) has so far collected about two 
dozen different technologies[2] that all try to encode metadata for 
usage policies in some way, and that doesn't yet include EOT[3], 
OTW[4]/TTW[5], MAME[6] or EEULAA[7].

[1] http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/httpbis-charter.html
[2] http://www.w3.org/Policy/pling/wiki/PolicyLangReview
[3] http://www.w3.org/Submission/EOT/
[4] 
http://blog.fontembedding.com/post/2009/06/10/New-Web-Fonts-Proposal.aspx
[5] http://www.w3.org/Fonts/Misc/minutes-2008-10#Compromise
[6] http://noeot.com/mame.html
[7] http://www.eeulaa.org/



Bert
-- 
  Bert Bos                                ( W 3 C ) http://www.w3.org/
  http://www.w3.org/people/bos                               W3C/ERCIM
  bert@w3.org                             2004 Rt des Lucioles / BP 93
  +33 (0)4 92 38 76 92            06902 Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France

Received on Wednesday, 8 July 2009 13:03:51 UTC