RE: Agenda, action items and suggested WOFF changes

On Monday, May 17, 2010 4:56 PM Sylvain Galineau wrote:
> From: www-font-request@w3.org On Behalf Of Levantovsky, Vladimir
> >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. 

Right, so what is not useful about it?

> 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 ? 

I believe Richard Fink has mentioned that Font Squirrel's online @font-face converter presented a pup-up dialog that required users to attest they have the rights to do font conversion, and I responded to him that I do not think it is a good idea. What makes you believe something like this would ever be presented as a requirement?

> 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.

I agree.

> 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.
> 

Thank you, these are valid concerns.

Regards,
Vladimir

Received on Monday, 17 May 2010 21:34:35 UTC