[Fedora-packaging] Web Assets/JavaScript guideline drafts

[T.C. Hollingsworth]

On Fri, Jul 12, 2013 at 6:08 AM, Nicolas Mailhot
<nicolas.mailhot at laposte.net> wrote:
> Apps that target IE < 9 do not use web fonts. There are so many things
> that do not work in IE < 9 anyway web fonts are the least of your worries.
> Even if pre-opentype ie web font support sort of looks like the same thing
> with a different format, it has been out there for a decade with *nobody*
> *using* *it*.
>
> There are *no* serious web apps written for IE < 9 and special font
> formats. Webapp authors started using web fonts when the support got
> available in firefox and chrome, and at that time it was already
> opentype-only (woff was added later; by the time woff-compatible browsers
> got widespread opentype was already supported ie-side too)
>
> Remember, even without @font-face the web app is not broken, the browser
> will just use a local font instead

Sorry, I misread the charts on caniuse.com.  I thought IE 8 supported
WOFF, in which case IMHO it would be worth supporting.  It does not,
as you point out, so I agree it's not worth supporting.

I've replaced the previous webfont exception with text explicitly
stating there is no exception to the standard Fedora font policy:
https://fedoraproject.org/w/index.php?title=User%3APatches%2FPackagingDrafts%2FWeb_Assets&diff=345116&oldid=344634

> The svg font format is incomplete, you can not display text cleanly with
> it (svg fonts are shapes without hinting instructions). It is so bad it
> was not considered one minute when woff was defined, even though the
> people defining woff all came from free software/browser communities with
> strong pro-svg biases.
>
> Any svg file with non-trivial text strings will use some other font
> format. I doubt anything that uses "svg fonts" will use external shareable
> wide-encoding files instead of embedding a dozen glyphs in a private svg
> image.
>
> svg is a good vector image format. That does not mean it's a good font
> format. Likewise, just because some exotic font format has been designed
> for the web does not mean the design succeeded in producing anything worth
> replacing opentype with.

I guess this is really no different than PDFs.

> Just because it is permitted does not mean it's a good idea. Fedora does
> not implement every spec out there just because it's permitted, it
> implements specs that make sense for its users. Explicitly allowing every
> possible web font format without any actual proven need will just lead to
> more cargo culting by webapp authors and webapp packagers since it's just
> easier to dump every possible font format on the repository than analyse
> whether it serves any actual purpose.

-T.C.