RE: WOFF and extended metadata

> From: Gustavo Ferreira [mailto:gustavo.ferreira@hipertipo.net]
> Sent: Thursday, May 27, 2010 7:42 AM


> Suggesting that it is up to 'font vendors' to build add-ons to access
> metadata is absurd. Font makers are mostly individuals such as myself
> or small teams, not companies like Mozilla or Google or Microsoft.
> Really, it's your job to build tools to read and display woff data, not
> ours. Our job is to make good webfonts, and that's already difficult
> enough thanks to OS and browser makers failing to provide even the most
> basic standards for font rendering.

The point is not to make you specifically do the job. The point is that you 
and any number of interested parties - including font vendors with far more
resources than yours - can do this job today if they so desire. Anyone can add 
this feature to a browser. Requiring me to do something no one else needs me
for is absurd. Especially if there are far, far more important issues with 
OS/browser font rendering!

I'd rather work with you on those, to be frank. Because the impact of that work
may benefit *all* my users, not just the tiny minority among my user base that 
messes with CSS and fonts on a regular basis, all of whom are not just perfectly 
comfortable downloading add-ons and development tools but may in fact never ever 
use my basic built-in font info dialog in favor of some dedicated independent 
developer's carefully crafted web font wizard add-on that shows not just metadata, 
but lets the user sample the font at different sizes and line-heights, generates the 
@font-face rule for them and who knows what else.

I can trust your font design expertise. You can trust that browser vendors know where
their time and efforts are best spent, what features need to be built-in to foster adoption
and interop, which ones are the realm of third-party extensions, and which ones should be 
'promoted' from the latter to the former.

Received on Thursday, 27 May 2010 15:17:53 UTC