RE: EOT-Lite File Format

On Fri, 2009-07-31 at 01:40 +0000, Sylvain Galineau wrote:
> >From: www-font-request@w3.org [mailto:www-font-request@w3.org] On Behalf
> >Of Thomas Lord
> 
> 
> >That's called "intolerance in what you receive"
> >and while Internet standards must not forbid
> >such intolerance, neither may they require it.
> >("may?  according to what authority?" - answer:
> >"common sense - well, at least the common sense
> >that comes with experience").
> 
> We're not writing an IETF standard. We're defining a
> file format. 

We're writing an Internet standard and I think
that W3C is generally aligned with the IETF 
sense of best practices.

A conspiracy theory for some of us is of 
"you guys" trying to corrupt W3C in precisely
this area.  I'm trying to resist that conspiracy 
theory and you could do more to help, if you 
know what I mean.


> We're perfectly allowed to say that
> a certain header value requires the file to be ignored.

Yes.

> We do that with the magic number. We do that with the
> version number. We could do that with other fields.

Ignored is different from what the original post 
of EOT-lite says.


> >You have a usable font file but the standard
> >says "you MUST NOT use it" -- yes, that is DRM.
> 
> You don't know if you have a usable font file.
> If checking for zero vs. non-zero is DRM then
> everything is.

I'm stopping here.  Your statement is nonsense,
in my book, but in other messages you've been
expressing non-nonsense so let's please agree to
wait for others to catch up on this issue before
we move on on this particular topic between you
and I.

-t



> 
> >I am thinking of the situation of a UA maker who
> >goes ahead and implements support for TTCOMPRESSED
> >and/or XORENCRYPT... as an example.  They have done
> >a perfectly useful thing in support of the lawful activity
> >of some users yet if the Recommendation says they
> >"MUST NOT" do so then at the very least they lose their
> >"conforming implementation" badge and at worse come under
> >legal attack for spreading a "circumvention" device.
> 
> In which case the UA maker implemented EOT, not EOTL.
> Which means they are not only allowed but required to
> render the file. The fact that it uses compression and
> XOR-encoding makes it both invalid and unusable for
> EOTL-conforming clients.
> 
> Which means IE already is a circumvention device for...
> ...files that only IE will be able to use ?
> 
> Anyway. We're not lawyers.

Received on Friday, 31 July 2009 01:52:39 UTC