Re: WebOTF Proposal

Hi,

Tal Leming wrote:
> We, (Jonathan Kew, Erik van Blokland and myself) have combined our ZOT 
> and .webfont proposals into a new WebOTF proposal. The full 
> specification is attached.
Thanks for this!

I take it that the this would completely replace TTF/OTF as EOTL would.

I am much happier with this format supplanting TTF/OTF as it contains 
several good features:
* Design for a blend of minimal bandwidth and minimal RAM usage (and as 
a web developer I need know nothing of what is being done behind the 
scenes to get the best blend)
* Generous space for rights expression in a simple, structured way
* Absolutely no whiff of EOT
* Can be used by any application that supports it, web or otherwise, 
therefore avoiding confusion for people who do not know the 'back story' 
as with EOT.

In short, it looks to the future.

I like the way the metadata aspect is handled in the proposal. A 
facility for displaying such metadata, built into any apps that support 
the format, would be cute (currently this seems always to be done by OS 
font manager software rather than in the app, but that could change).

I regret that the proposal does not give current Internet Explorer users 
any benefits. But I feel it is better to think in terms of a 
technological platform that improves on current solutions rather than in 
terms of a short cut delivering no technological improvement and 
patching over a long-time standoff.

I think the key facts are:
* Users benefit from the savings in bandwidth and memory, aka greater 
speed of rendering
* Publishers get to express their rights and the history of the work 
embodied in the font with metadata that's likely to be tidier than what 
people put into, or leave out of, their OpenType fonts

What data and/or code do you imagine might be put in the private data block?

Cheers,
Ben


-- 
Ben Weiner | http://readingtype.org.uk/about/contact.html

Received on Thursday, 6 August 2009 22:14:27 UTC