RE: A way forward - I Propose An Active Adjournment For Assessment

Friday, July 24, 2009 John Hudson <tiro@tiro.com>:

>I'm still familiarising myself with ZOT -- as I wrote earlier, it isn't 
>a proposal that has been well presented to the professional font 
>community; most of my colleagues are completely ignorant of it --, but 
>my initial response is positive.

John,

The same state of ignorance and lack of familiarity exists about the new
EOT, as well. It is a very, very recent development. Dimly understood. I
believe that if the larger web design community understood that an
interoperable solution for Web Fonts could be in hand within 2-3 years,
rather than 6-10 years, as is the case with the .ZOT proposal, or any other
proposal other than the new EOT, it may have a significant effect on the
debate.
Since you seem willing to "move on" to a solution that lies so far into the
future, then I would imagine a few months more or less won't make a
difference to you or anybody else who has so far signed on to it.
Right? Time doesn't seem to be of the essence, now, certainly.

So how does everybody feel about an adjournment of sorts, during which time
the facts and the options they imply are allowed to propagate out to the
larger community that this decision will so strongly effect?
How about allowing time for a little bit of democratic debate and a fair
trial in the court of public opinion to take place?

I'd like for others to have the chance to question of why, for no good
reason that many of us can see, the creators of Firefox would choose to
subject us to an extra five years of extra costs and inconveniences for no
good reason. I'm sure designers and developers would very much like to weigh
in with informed opinion.
We're not talking about rounded corners, here. We're talking about
typefaces, the foundation of human communication and page design.

So, I propose not a recess - because the whole point is for active, spirited
debate to continue - but an adjournment of, say, 90 days, before taking a
next step which focuses exclusively on the .ZOT or similar proposals. 
Let's face it, such a step provides those who so far have refused to
seriously consider the new EOT, a very convenient way to carve it out of the
picture, and therefore it should not be taken in haste and without an
informed constituency.

Do you see what I'm saying? You've already gotten very, very, very quick
commitments regarding a non-EOT, long-view proposal. Nothing much more is
going to be done in 90 days, certainly.
So is an adjournment OK with you?

Anybody?


Cheers,

rich

-----Original Message-----
From: www-font-request@w3.org [mailto:www-font-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of
John Hudson
Sent: Friday, July 24, 2009 1:24 PM
To: Håkon Wium Lie
Cc: www-font
Subject: Re: A way forward

Håkon Wium Lie wrote:

>  > Both Sylvain Galineau and John Daggett have now indicated that they 
>  > might be willing to participate in a process to standardise something 
>  > like .webfont or ZOT. 

> I think ZOT is a very good idea. If browsers added support for ZOT,
> would you publish fonts in it?

I'm still familiarising myself with ZOT -- as I wrote earlier, it isn't 
a proposal that has been well presented to the professional font 
community; most of my colleagues are completely ignorant of it --, but 
my initial response is positive.

However, I agree with Tal that a generic wrapper that could be placed 
around other font data formats, including non-sfnt fonts, is worth 
having, rather than tying web fonts to a specific font data format (even 
if, for the time being, no other format is under consideration). 
However, there is no reason why the .webfont wrapper could not be put 
around a ZOT'd font, so both proposals could be part of an interoperable 
solution. This is something that a working group could determine.

John Hudson

Received on Friday, 24 July 2009 19:31:17 UTC