Re: WOFF and extended metadata

On Thu, May 20, 2010 at 10:17 AM, Levantovsky, Vladimir
<Vladimir.Levantovsky@monotypeimaging.com> wrote:
> It would help greatly to clarify things if you tell us where you see a connection between XML metadata and font rendering pipeline. For example, JPEG file format includes EXIF metadata - most image viewers allow you to see it via properties / image info dialog but it has nothing to do with JPEG decoder that processes image data.
>
> Similar, font data encoded in WOFF and XML-formatted metadata are two separate and completely independent blocks of data. Unpacked font data goes into the font rendering pipeline while metadata remains to be a part of the WOFF file. If UA provided a dialog displaying font info encoded in metadata, how could it possibly affect font rendering pipeline?

The term UA here is a little loose. Browsers, for example, typically
don't show EXIF metadata for JPEGs (at least in my experience and I
can't find it clicking around in Firefox nor Chrome). Image
manipulation tools, being more focused, certainly do.

Likewise, I wouldn't expect to be able to view font metadata in a
browser, while I would in a font editing tool.

The value of validating XML metadata in a browser is likely to be
dwarfed by the costs in time and code complexity. For the Chrome code
base I can say that without the qualification.


AGL