- From: Thomas Lord <lord@emf.net>
- Date: Thu, 09 Jul 2009 11:28:57 -0700
- To: Erik van Blokland <erik@letterror.com>
- Cc: Tal Leming <tal@typesupply.com>, www-font <www-font@w3.org>
On Thu, 2009-07-09 at 09:26 +0200, Erik van Blokland wrote: > On Jul 9, 2009, at 12:08 AM, Thomas Lord wrote: > > Suppose that all of that is fine with you > > and Erik and the font vendors. You can separate > > representation from logical structure and have a more binary > > friendly format such as MIME. You can work with, > > perhaps extending, the ccREL vocabulary. > I'll have a look, thanks. Thanks. Just as an anecdote I should mention that I came across ccREL *after* I thought of the basic idea of my wrapper proposal. It was quite an eye opener of the form: "Ah. I see. Those guys are actually several *years* ahead of me. Well, I can pretend to console myself with the old 'great minds think alike' notion." :-) > Two concerns though. > At first glance it seems ccREL offers licensing info on elements that > end up on a page, which implies some sort of UI behaviour. A font > would not have a straightforward location for such data, as it is > everywhere and nowhere. The notion of my wrapper proposal is to create a "container" format. There's one media file, the container. In it is a regular font file in OTF, perhaps EOT-lite, or whatever. Also in the same container is a *page about the font*. On that page there can be RDFa content which conveys licensing information in a machine-processable form. Does that make sense or am I being too terse? > Working with ccREL would mean trying to convince the Creative Commons > about adding support for non-CC proprietary stuff? You can use *and extend* ccREL without needing any permission or agreement from the Creative Commons folks. Where they have already defined abstract vocabulary that fits the bill - use what they already defined. Where something new is needed, declare a new XML namespace and define the new vocabulary you need. Now, to be sure, there's probably no harm in talking with the Creative Commons guys and saying to them "your vocabulary is incomplete for our needs, please consider additions like ______" but nothing, as far as I can see, hinges on how they respond to such advice. > While these are all > sympathetic folks, it would just be another uphill battle. Again: the technical structure of ccREL and RDFa is such that you need absolutely 0 buy-in or cooperation from the Creative Commons guys. You can ignore them or engage them as see fit. Should you engage them, it's all upside insofar as if they say "no" or "go away" or whatever then just ignore them. I would guess they won't feel any urgency to say a lot more than "thanks for letting us know what you're doing; we'll consider it". But, again, it doesn't matter: you do not need to get any kind of agreement from them at all. You don't even, formally speaking, need to talk with them. > I think we > can take ideas from proposals like ccREL, it certainly helps to be > able to point to precedence. More than just precedence. You can see from the ccREL spec and the RDFa tutorial that a key element of those is encouraging browser makers to add new features to make this meta-data apparent to users in a friendly way. You, I think, ought to want to leverage that. "Us too, We want that as well!" Then browser makers have double the incentive to satisfy both "you guys" and the "CC guys". It's really a virtue of what the CC guys have done so far that you have a chance here to buy into their work without being obliged to cooperate with them - just the kind of thing a good standards process is supposed to yield. > > I would suggest that > > the meta-data should be HTML. > In which context would this be visible? As an example, my opinion is that when I look at a page and it has linked resources (images, fonts, audio or video files, etc.) that a toolbar-type thingie in my browser should offer up "about" links for those. Additionally, suppose my browser has (in addition to a "save this page" option) a "save the font used here" option. I look at a page, it has a nice font, I click "save this font"..... I think a reasonable Recommendation would say that the UA SHOULD, if "save this font" is chosen, display a summary of the ccREL data extracted from the RDFa markup of the HTML page, with an option to view the entire HTML page. In other words, I click "save font" and a dialog box pops up that says: Copyright (c) xxxx........... License information: [some link] Prohibited: copying, distribution, derivative works [button: view full meta-data for this font] [options: Proceed to save font? [yes] [cancel]] -t
Received on Thursday, 9 July 2009 18:29:37 UTC