Re: New work on fonts at W3C

On Wed, Jun 17, 2009 at 7:47 PM, Chris Wilson<Chris.Wilson@microsoft.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 16 Jun 2009 Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch> wrote:
>>On Tue, 16 Jun 2009, Levantovsky, Vladimir wrote:
>>> The important point is that we seem to agree we need a universally
>>> supported web font wrapper that would allow to put "signs and fences" to
>>> reduce a risk of font piracy to a level that would be acceptable for
>>> font foundries.
>>
>>FWIW, I don't think there is anything resembling consensus on this point.
>
> Consensus from whom, and how are we counting?

I assume he means consensus from relevant parties, e.g.: web page
authors, browser authors, font authors, W3C members.  I don't think
it's safe to say that all browser implementers, especially, currently
agree that "we need a universally supported web font wrapper that
would allow to put 'signs and fences' to reduce a risk of font piracy
to a level that would be acceptable for font foundries".

I previously quoted a post by David Baron, one of Mozilla's core
developers, which suggested that OpenType/TrueType should be tried
before introducing new font formats.  John Daggett has posted in this
thread suggesting the same, and he's apparently the one who wrote web
font support for Firefox (at least, he's the assignee for bug 70132).
Anne van Kesteren from Opera, again in this very thread, suggested
pretty much the same thing, that maybe OpenType/TrueType is good
enough and we should wait and see.

Possibly more to the point, Mozilla, Apple, Google, and Opera are all
including OpenType/TrueType support in current or soon-to-be-released
versions of their browsers, and are not supporting other formats.
This seems to indicate that they think OpenType/TrueType support would
be of significant utility by itself, given the effort they had to
invest to get it working.

I think it's fair to conclude that there is not currently consensus
among browser implementers that it's clear yet that a new font format
is needed.  Unscientifically, it seems to me that most browser
implementers feel the opposite, in fact.  So I'd say Ian's statement
is fair.  There does seem to be consensus among font foundry
representatives that a new format is needed, and consensus among
Microsoft representatives, from what I've seen.

Received on Thursday, 18 June 2009 14:20:59 UTC