Alternatives to altGlyph for non-SVG fonts

Hi All

I noticed that altGlyph is to be removed from SVG2 along with SVG Fonts:

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-svg/2014Jun/0086.html

But this will remove the ability for SVG to access arbitrary glyphs in fonts,
which is often seen in formats such as PDF and of course, existing SVG 1.1
documents which make use of SVG Fonts. Currently there’s no way to
port such documents to SVG2.

Would it be possible to either keep altGlyph and define a format for glyphRef
to access TTF/OTF glyphs, for example GID 4 could be accessed using:

<altGlyph glyphRef="gid(4)”>x<altGlyph>

Better yet, could a minimal replacement for altGlyph be introduced, for
use only with TTF/OTF web fonts?

Regards,

John A Hewson, Ph.D.