Re: Metadata in WOFF fonts

> I have some concerns about the pieces of metadata which are meaningful for OT fonts in general and not only for WOFF fonts (for example, the licensee or the roles of the contributors). I am absolutely not judging whether those pieces are useful, but I would like to suggest that if they are, then they should be expressible in plain OT fonts, and they don't belong to WOFF.

Eric,

Vlad makes the key point that the font binary is not expected to be parsed by the browser, while a simple zipped piece of XML is well within a browser's scope.

I can offer a couple more grounds for adding the fields you mention into WOFF.

- While a foundry or vendor may wish to include licensee information in their web fonts (so that if the font floats around the web, it will remain identifiable), it is not necessarily the case that the original font binary can easily be modified or regenerated for each sale. By contrast, the foundry or vendor can run sfnt2woff for every sale fairly easily.

- Identifying actual living people as creators of a font helps to remind users (legitimate and illegitimate) that fonts are creative works under copyright that should not be used without permission. Since these fonts will inevitably be stumbled upon - by definition they're available on the web - it's particularly important to remind stumblers of this matter. Although there is space for designer info in the original font, lots of existing font binaries without credits will be wrapped unmodified and sold as WOFF - the credit elements allow these fonts also to benefit from the idea that showing credits is good.

- L

Received on Friday, 6 August 2010 02:08:59 UTC