RE: WOFF and extended metadata

On Wednesday, May 26, 2010 2:20 AM Gustavo Ferreira wrote:
> 
> 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.)
> 

This information is supposed to be provided as the extended metadata in the WOFF file. However, the only way to see it is if the browser enables some kind of UI option ("page info", "font info", etc.) or exposes WOFF metadata via a special purpose API. Currently, there is nothing in the WOFF spec that would suggest/recommend for a browser to expose the metadata info to a user.

Regards,
Vlad

> 
> 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 12:34:48 UTC