Re: WOFF and extended metadata

A user visits a website which uses WOFF fonts.

He/she likes the fonts and wants to get more information about them: what's their name? who designed them, when? what is their license? are they free/open? where can I get them? etc.

How will he/she get to this info?

(Just trying to understand how this would work.)


Em 25 mei 2010, ās 23:45, Sylvain Galineau escreveu:

>> From: www-font-request@w3.org [mailto:www-font-request@w3.org] On
>> Behalf Of Levantovsky, Vladimir
> 
> 
>> The purpose of this sentence is to provide specify recommended behavior,
>> "MAY" has a completely different meaning.
> 
> "MAY" is appropriate. The vast, vast majority of browser users will *never* 
> look at this information. Ever. I don't think browser vendors should have
> to justify not implementing such a specialized metadata feature, yet 
> SHOULD implicitly requires them to do just that since it is recommended. 
> 
> Fonts will still carry your metadata. Web authors will still want to access
> it. Browser vendors should be free to expose it in whatever way they wish,
> be it as a built-in dialog or an API exposed for applications and add-ons,
> or both. Most importantly for the format's adoption, they should be able to 
> implement this *when* they wish.
> 
> Summary: 1) this block is optional, 2) the invalidity of its content has no 
> effect on the runtime use of the font data thus 3) recommending a UI mechanism 
> here is toothless in practice, which means that 4) making this a SHOULD will 
> likely result in most browsers being both non-conformant and interoperable. 
> I don't think that's an interesting result from a standardization standpoint.
> 
> If the metadata format is simple and extensible, we're definitely interested in 
> supporting this eventually. But that is unlikely to be a priority in the first 
> release that supports WOFF i.e. whether the lack of font metadata info UI makes us 
> non-conformant with respect to WOFF will be up to web authors. That would make it
> a MAY.

Received on Wednesday, 26 May 2010 06:20:58 UTC