Re: Current Downloadable Font Status....

On Oct 6,  2:23pm, Martin J. Dürst wrote:

> On Thu, 11 Sep 1997, Chris Lilley wrote:

> > <OBJECT DATA="Bundesbahn#47" TYPE="application/font-tdpfr"
> >  WIDTH="50" HEIGHT="60">
> >      <P>Alt Gif goes here
> > </OBJECT>
>
> This looks even better!

Of course, with agreement from the implementers of WebFonts for this
sort of "fonts as scalable images" it would be even better, because
then the code above would produce the required result rather than
just being syntactically valid and semantically suggestive ;-)


> > > Probably we would also need a size attribute, but I guess the right
> > > way to provide it, as well as other presentation attributes, would
> > > be via style.
> >
> > The issue of inheriting style properties into an OBJECT is interesting
> > and is currently being investigated at RAL.
>
> Can you tell us what RAL means?

Oh, sorry. Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, a W3C member.

> > I don't think you need any HTML extensions to do this, just an
> > implementation. Browsers which have already implemented WebFonts should
> > find support for this fairly simple to add.
>
> Yes. But I think it would make sense for those that do it to agree
> on how to do it. We still have various variants.

Yes. I sense a note in the offing, if anyone has the time to write it.
Certainly, what to do with decorative images that happen to be scalable
and happen to be in a font format rather than some other scalable
graphics format is an outstanding issue.

The least desirable thing is that people scatter Latin characters through
their document which, given the right font, appear as pictures. Somewhat
more desirable is to use Private Use characters (to indicate that the
characters have no semantic meaning in the wider context). But if fonts
are being usef purely to creatte images, labelling them as images seems
a good idea.

On the other hand, the OBJECT method does require the width and height
to be explicitly stated in pixels, which is not necessarily desirable.

-- 
Chris Lilley, W3C                          [ http://www.w3.org/ ]
Graphics and Fonts Guy            The World Wide Web Consortium
http://www.w3.org/people/chris/              INRIA,  Projet W3C
chris@w3.org                       2004 Rt des Lucioles / BP 93
+33 (0)4 93 65 79 87       06902 Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France