RE: New work on fonts at W3C

John Daggett [mailto:jdaggett@mozilla.com] wrote:
>On this point, actions speak louder than words.  Rather than kvetch
>about TTF/OTF direct linking, it would help things immensely if
>Microsoft were to publicly participate in discussing these matters and
>make improvements in Internet Explorer to make using @font-face less
>painful than it is today. After simply pushing EOT as "the answer" to
>this problem, very little has been done by Microsoft to participate in
>cooperative discussions of the solution.

Hmm.  I would say the same has been true of the other camp, who have simply been pushing "TTF linking is the answer" and walking away from the other problems.  Kinda how I see the "font foundries will just get replaced by ones who like this strategy" comment.

>I'm thinking mostly of the
>Microsoft Typography folks who were pushing the original EOT plan, not
>the IE folks per se.  The Typography folks didn't attend the TPAC
>discussion last fall and appear to have lost interest after the EOT
>proposal was rejected.

Typography didn't have the budget to travel from Redmond to Europe for a couple-hour meeting, and ideally, I would have been able to sit in (but was chairing the HTML WG meeting at the time).

>It's hard to listen to dictates on the solution here when Microsoft
>seems disinclined to participate in finding a solution at the same time
>other Microsoft API's such as Silverlight actively highlight their
>support for linking to TTF fonts.

I'm unaware that there's been any effort to find a solution, other than the push to start a WG on the topic; an effort that, as I understand it, keeps getting blocked?

As for Silverlight, I think "actively highlight[ing] their support for linking to TTF" is a bit of an overstatement.  You can't even do this in markup, and the documentation clearly says you can't use this for fonts you don't have a proper license for; they didn't feel, on their own, they could go start a new font format effort.  If a "web font format" starts up, I would expect Silverlight to be quite interested.

>Simply quoting captive IE market share numbers as your trump in
>determining "consensus" is not really a valid metric.

No more is saying "well we have three browsers who think it's a good idea, so we don't really care what foundries think."  I didn't say "captive IE market shares are a trump" - I said given IE's relative market share, I would expect a "consensus" to include IE, and given IE's stated opposition to linked TTF, I therefore wouldn't call it a consensus.  (Nor, as I explained, did I claim EOT or OTW or anything else had consensus, even among font vendors - though EOT with the embed bit opt-out is close, just across font vendors.)

>Better support
>for @font-face features [1], even if just for EOT,
>[1] Feature improvements needed in IE @font-face implementation:
>  * support for font-weight, font-style descriptors

Noted - but lower priority than a whole lot of other features, I would expect.

>  * Postscript CFF font (.otf) support in t2embed.dll

Indeed.  If there's interest in EOT, I would absolutely expect this to happen.

>  * better tools than WEFT for making EOT versions of fonts (including not crashing when .otf fonts are present)

Publishing the format was the first step toward that, and I know the Typography guys had more planned; but if no one else is going to care, then I doubt it's a useful spend of Microsoft's money...

>and active
>participation in discussions would be much more helpful.

Indeed.  Where and how?

-Chris

Received on Friday, 19 June 2009 23:56:26 UTC