From: Rick McGowan (rick@unicode.org)
Date: Tue Jan 19 2010 - 13:34:47 CST
Brett Zamir wrote:
> allowing one to specify a font on one's website which supports the
> characters needed by the page, as the browser might not have built-in
> font support for more obscure characters).
Also sounds like a substantial potential security risk, so you'd want
that to be a trusted authority, so I expect most people would want to
turn that feature off, or at least make it ask and have certificates,
etc, etc.
>
> ... to house a central repository of basic (open-source or otherwise
> licensed) fonts which can be used by browsers to automatically
> download the fonts not already supported in the browser
Aaagh! It'll never work "correctly". By "correctly" I mean downloading
only once per machine that needs it, a particular font from a particular
server. Sounds to me like another potential nightmare for people who
have important websites that lots of people want to refer to and
download from "automatically" in web pages. See what the W3C says about
DTD downloading.
http://www.w3.org/blog/systeam/2008/02/08/w3c_s_excessive_dtd_traffic
Our experience on Unicode.org has been similar with the DTDs for LDML,
so we went to use of non-URL-like DTD specs to eliminate that excessive
traffic. And yet, people *still* download, sometimes several hundred
times in one day on one machine, old DTDs for previous out-dated LDML specs.
In my personal opinion, the best way to assure that people everywhere
have basic fonts that "cover Unicode" is to release systems with at
least a basic coverage set built into them. And hopefully also allow
users of prior software/font versions to upgrade them. I think that's
happening to some extent, and it will improve in the future. As time
goes on, the problem becomes less acute.
Rick
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Tue Jan 19 2010 - 13:38:00 CST