RE: WOFF and extended metadata

> From: Sergey Malkin
> Sent: Friday, May 28, 2010 9:18 AM


> > Since WOFF is designed so that individual font data tables can be
> separately unpacked,
> > I'm not sure whether there would be a benefit to including such
> information in the WOFF
> > metadata in addition to or instead of in the font data. 

The data need not be limited to items that are present in the font data.
And it's a safe bet that many tool makers - think browser add-ons - will
prefer parsing simple XML name-value pairs (something they already routinely
do) rather than making sense of OpenType binary data.

> Vendor-specific metadata is important, but it is definitely not for
> user's eyes. 

That would be up to the vendor, imo. If there is data they want to show
to the user that is not included in the current schema, I'd rather give
them a very simple and constrained mechanism to do that rather than having
this WG revision this schema 10 times in the next 5 years with each browser
rendering different versions of it.

> We can reserve defined place in metatadta which will be
> known as not touched and displayed by UA. For strings that are not part
> of predefined fields, but vendor really wants user to see, there may be
> another clearly designated place, but only restricted to plain strings.

Yes. Exactly my suggestion. Vendors may add name-value pairs here. No
open-ended markup, only named strings.

> It may allow localization similar to defined fields, but not more than
> that. Add URL to the site where you can get more information, and I'll
> be happy with the result.

Received on Friday, 28 May 2010 17:00:14 UTC