Re: WOFF and extended metadata

On 25 May 2010, at 16:49, Tal Leming wrote:

> 
> On May 24, 2010, at 2:53 PM, Sylvain Galineau wrote:
> 
>> My personal preference would be to forgo XML here and use a flat property bag/name-value
>> pair format no more complex than JSON. We'd define a basic set of common property names
>> e.g. font name, authors, copyright, version, vendor URL etc. and let font makers add whatever 
>> else they wish. It will be far easier to create, edit and extend; and browser vendors will be 
>> able to provide a generic UI control to show all the properties. 
>> 
>> It could be that I missed the reason to use XML e.g. maybe we want to nest things hierarchically.
>> Since Firefox is the first implementation out there, I'm curious to hear about what they have done
>> in this respect, or what their plans are ?

Firefox does not yet do anything with WOFF metadata, but we'd like to provide access to it... it's just a matter of development resources.

> 
> We explored other formats, but we kept coming back to XML for its extensibility. The nesting came out of the need for enabling localization, among other things.

Yes, that's a significant factor. E.g., see <http://www.w3.org/Submission/2010/SUBM-WOFF-20100408/#appendix-b>, where several of the fields are provided in multiple languages.

Actually, I'd suggest that unless there are significant technical problems with using XML as currently specified (modulo any clarifications etc that we decide are needed), we probably shouldn't be reopening this issue. As the Charter <http://www.w3.org/2009/08/WebFonts/charter.html> says, "...the group would be chartered to only make the minimal changes needed for interoperability and standardisation." Replacing the XML metadata with JSON or some other format is hardly such a "minimal change", unless the existing XML option is fundamentally flawed in some way.

JK

Received on Tuesday, 25 May 2010 16:50:52 UTC