Re: External References for <use>

Hi, David-

David Woolley wrote (on 8/2/09 4:30 AM):
> Doug Schepers wrote:
>
>> topic-specific use. Because this feature has not enjoyed much support
>> in implementations, this feature has not seen much uptake by
>> authors... the most common version of the Adobe viewer didn't support
>> it (though a
>
> I suspect it was a low priority for Adobe, because their primary market
> was marketing, for which looking like the competition is anathema.

I'm not sure what this means.  What competition of Adobe allowed 
distributed symbol and resource libraries?


> The mechanism presumably has the same issues as web fonts with regard to
> licence enforcement and royalties. That might also discourage a vendor
> aiming at a highly commercialised market.

Please don't make the mistake of conflating external references with 
referencing just fonts.  Fonts are just one of many types of resources 
that can be referenced externally, and at this point, I don't think it's 
even the most interesting use.


>> "~:'' ありがとうございました" wrote (on 7/31/09 7:31 AM):
>
>>> 80,000 votes from this list ~:"
>
> Might be seen as vote rigging!

Well, despite the fact that I don't think that many people will actually 
follow up on this, it's not vote rigging.  It's a large number of people 
sounding out about a feature they want implemented.


>>> it enables graphics to be simply re-purposed and saves bandwidth where
>>> this may be limited, such as
>>> people with low-literacy in remote areas of non-industrialised countries
>>> using mobile phones.
>
> I'm not entirely convinced that this use case isn't one for web fonts,
> rather than the more general use mechanism. As I understand it, what
> Jonathon is working on is a new ideographic writing system without the
> abstraction of character forms that has entered into Chinese Hanzi and
> Japanese Kanji.

Jonathan's particular use of external references doesn't matter... the 
general functionality is useful for a wide variety of use cases.  For 
the vast majority of these cases, using fonts or Unicode glyphs would be 
a misuse.

Regards-
-Doug Schepers
W3C Team Contact, SVG and WebApps WGs

Received on Sunday, 2 August 2009 18:00:12 UTC