Re: Next step?

On Wednesday, October 21, 2009, 10:31:31 PM, John wrote:


JH> I think it is selling WOFF short to presume at this stage that the 
JH> conformance requirement should be 'any-2-of-4'. At the very least, the
JH> consensus potential of WOFF should be seriously explored by the browser
JH> makers, such that we have the possibility of defining a single required
JH> format for conformance, 

Personally I would be happy to see WOFF required for conformance. If we can get there, that would be great.

Earlier discussions had seemed to indicate a desire for even-handedness, not favouring any one format. In that situation, allowing support of one format to claim conforance gets us nowhere - IE already has CWT support by virtue of their EOT support, Opera and Firefox and Safari already have raw OT/TT support, most SVG implementations already have SVG font support, and ... the content developer looses.

Requiring support for at least two means that most implementations have to do something extra (Mozilla now has WOFF and OT, Opera has OT and SVG) and my assumption was that, faced with having to support one more format, everyone would pick WOFF is they didn't already have it.

So my assumption had been that we would end up with "WOFF plus whatever we have now" in most implementations.

JH> which doesn't prevent any number of optional 
JH> formats being supported or, indeed, a 'WOFF-plus-one' conformance 
JH> requirement (although I really don't see the benefit of that).

Well, WOFF plus one gives a bit of belt and braces overlap. Although WOFF seems like a favorite, we don't *yet* know that it will become the outright leader such that a brand new implementation could safely implement WOFF only.


-- 
 Chris Lilley                    mailto:chris@w3.org
 Technical Director, Interaction Domain
 W3C Graphics Activity Lead
 Co-Chair, W3C Hypertext CG

Received on Thursday, 22 October 2009 10:38:54 UTC