RE: Agenda, action items and suggested WOFF changes

From: www-font-request@w3.org [mailto:www-font-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Levantovsky, Vladimir
Sent: Monday, May 17, 2010 4:20 AM


>If the WOFF spec should say that WOFF conversion tools must check embedding restrictions and notify a user about a particular condition, then it would have to be done for a tool to be compliant with the spec. You may >chose to write a script that doesn't do it, it would simply not be considered a conformant implementation.

That's not a useful requirement. If I write a command-line conversion tool that logs this and other warnings in a standard ASCII file, I have notified the user as well. They may or may not check the log though. They should. But they may not. So now, do you want to require this warning to be modal ? After all, my command-line tool might write the message to stdout and that can be redirected. Or it could write to stderr but it's part of a production CMS batch job and no one is there to see the message as it runs somewhere deep in a server farm. And if it's a batch job, a modal interruption would be highly undesirable. Thus we'd find ourselves with the spec deeming my tool non-compliant irrespective of whether its output is conformant or not, for reasons that have nothing to do with WOFF as a format, the ability of web clients to use the tool's output or my actual level of compliance with the licensing contracts I have with my font vendors or providers.

So I still don't understand what this achieves. At a minimum, one has to expect that a lot of users and web sites will be busy converting TTFs to WOFF themselves which is a questionable assumption imo. 

Requiring this will do nothing but make tool makers' lives harder. If the feature is that valuable to their users, tool makers will include it.

Received on Monday, 17 May 2010 21:01:27 UTC