Re: New work on fonts at W3C

Aryeh Gregor wrote:
> Once a universally supported subset of EOT is agreed upon, simple
> tools can be written that output that subset.  The procedure would be
> the same as any other proposal except raw TTF/OTF: stick in raw font
> file, get web font file.  If author confusion is a big deal, make up a
> new standard extension -- like .otw as Ascender has proposed.

It's important to notice that currently EOT has edge over other choices
only because its already supported by Microsoft Internet Explorer(*).
You cannot make up any new extension (standard or not) because it would
not be supported by currently available Microsoft Internet Explorer.

The camps so far are:

(1) raw TTF/OTF files (already supported by Firefox, Safari and Opera)
(2) EOT (already supported by Internet Explorer)

As I see it, for true interoperability to happen, at very minimum, one
of the two choices must happen:

(A) Microsoft implements support for raw TTF/OTF files
(B) All of Firefox, Safari and Opera implement support for EOT.

It seems to me that choice (A) would be easier because only one vendor
needs to implement anything. However, if we believe that because that
one vendor is Microsoft, that is not going to happen, we can pretty
safely assume also that there cannot be any third choice that requires
additional work (implementation) by Microsoft either.


(*) Some font vendors seem to favor EOT (only some variants?) over raw
TTF/OTF files, too.

-- 
Mikko