Re: EOT & DMCA concerns

On Wed, 2009-08-05 at 10:29 +0100, Oliver Rigby wrote:
> On Tue, 04 Aug 2009 16:49:02 -0700 Thomas Lord wrote:
> >Then to a future implementer.  An EOTL bug which
> >results in accidentally rendering an EOTC font
> >is quite easy to imagine.  Perhaps Moz. is above
> >such a mistake yet the possibility is relevant
> >to evaluating the quality of the proposed Recommendation.
> 
> This is not a reasonable concern and it can not practically happen.

It seems an odd claim in that EOTL is explicitly
designed as a format which a certain EOTC processor
will "just happen" to process.

I fully believe you if you say that someone who
sets out write from scratch a strict EOTL processor
has a very low probability of writing code that
will accidentally process EOTC.

I also believe that the ways of the world are such
that future implementers are not all that likely
to write their EOTL processor from scratch.  They
will grab a library or extract code from some other
system.   It is not so far fetched to imagine someone
searching for libraries, finding one advertised as
"supporting EOTL", and winding up with an EOTC processor.

And, I also believe that the ways of the world are
such that at some point, some programmer will be
going through a list of bug reports.  One will say:
"Here is this font file.  It works in IE but not
in your browser."   Perhaps the font file will come
from a popular generator of EOTL that contains a bug.
Thinking "be tolerant in what you receive" the programmer
quite plausibly might relax some of the checking in
in the EOTL processor - winding up with a processor
for some EOTC files.

If it were made very clear by the stakeholders that
there are no objections to supporting EOTC, sans any
enforcement features, the concern would go away.
An EOTL Recommendation would still be controversial - 
people might not want to be risk being stuck implementing
the "quirks" of IE.   The controversy, though, would 
shift in balance quite a bit - the argument for EOTL
would be very strong.

-t

Received on Wednesday, 5 August 2009 17:37:49 UTC