- From: John Daggett <jdaggett@mozilla.com>
- Date: Tue, 21 Jul 2009 13:44:18 -0700 (PDT)
- To: www-font <www-font@w3.org>
- Cc: Laurence Penney <lorp@lorp.org>, www-font <www-font@w3.org>, Thomas Phinney <tphinney@cal.berkeley.edu>
Aryeh Gregor wrote: > Thomas Phinney wrote: > > IMO, the main benefit of MTX is not that it is much more compressed > > than anything else (as you say, it isn't), but that it is the only > > in-font compression scheme that is compatible with the existing > > installed base of IE. > > Does IE not support gzip for EOT files, or is there some disadvantage > to HTTP-level (not in-font) compression that I'm missing? The disk > space should be negligible, bandwidth is the only concern I can see. These days all browsers support gzip compression of *any* web content. So the real issue is whether MTX or other font-specific compression techniques offer an advantage over general gzip compression and whether there's an advantage to using per-table compression as proposed by Jonathan Kew (i.e. the ZOT format [1]). Others have noted that breaking up the glyph table into separately compressed chunks would also have some advantages (e.g. for commonly used vs. less commonly used glyphs in CJK fonts). I was surprised that the issue of compression came up several times during the Typecon web fonts panel discussion [2] but no one pointed out that general gzip compression is available for all web content. Several folks presented the somewhat distorted view that standard TTF/OTF fonts have to be served uncompressed while EOT fonts can be compressed. This seems to be a persistent misconception. John Daggett Mozilla Japan [1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-font/2009JulSep/0018.html [2] http://virb.com/typecon/audio/434710
Received on Tuesday, 21 July 2009 20:44:59 UTC