RE: Including WOFF in ACID3

> From: www-font-request@w3.org [mailto:www-font-request@w3.org] On
> Behalf Of Dave Crossland
> Sent: Wednesday, October 13, 2010 11:41 PM
> To: www-font
> Subject: Re: Including WOFF in ACID3
> 
> On 14 October 2010 00:45, Gustavo Ferreira
> <gustavo.ferreira@hipertipo.net> wrote:
> > according to the specification, a WOFF+SVG browser must pass the test.
> 
> As I recall,  "WOFF will be the required format for compliance, the
> others being optional." was added to the spec when Microsoft was
> playing hardball and refusing to do TTF fonts.

Excuse me ? It would be about as accurate and relevant for me to claim that 
this statement was added when Mozilla and Opera were playing hardball and 
refused to implement EOT. That's just silly.

First, it's not anywhere in the spec. It's in the charter. There is a difference. 
By the time the charter was approved WOFF was already specified and implemented in 
Firefox. This statement had everything to do with browser vendors agreeing on one 
common encoding format for web fonts. A goal that had eluded us for years.

Second, whether Microsoft does or does not support any raw TTF resource
is irrelevant when virtually no font vendor is willing to license their
fonts for web use in their raw form. We were not and still are not interested
in supporting a format that reduces web authors' choice. We indicated we were 
willing to support any proposal that had the support of a majority of font 
designers i.e. not just free or commercial font makers. Even if it wasn't EOT.
We've proven that wasn't just hot air so I don't believe it's necessary
to make up some history that never happened to justify some dismissal after
the fact.

> 
> Now that MSIE *does* TTF, how can we add TTF to the specs alongside
> WOFF?
> 
> Clever use of TTF, Unicode-Range and transparent GZIP may outperform
> WOFF for very large fonts, so I'd like to see  TTF standardised
> alongside WOFF.

Standardized or required ? Is the fact that it *may* outperform - by how much ? -
sufficient to standardize/require something ? EOT or SVG Fonts *may* outperform 
one of the other format in some less common. Should we require them too ? If not,
why ?

Received on Thursday, 14 October 2010 19:53:07 UTC