[webkit-dev] EOT Support in WebKit

[David Hyatt]

I would like to talk about EOT support in WebKit.

http://www.w3.org/Submission/EOT/

EOT is an alternate file format for delivery of fonts using the @font- 
face directive.  It is supported by Internet Explorer on Windows.   
Microsoft has been trying to push it as a standard instead of allowing  
the use of TTF directly in @font-face.

This is a controversial feature.  Bert Bos has done a writeup here  
that talks about some of the issues:

http://www.w3.org/Fonts/Misc/eot-report-2008

It's worth noting that Bert has a pro-EOT bias, and this does come  
through in the article.  Robert O'Callahan of the Mozilla community  
has done a good job exposing some of that bias in his recent responses  
on www-style at lists.w3.org.

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2008Oct/0181.html
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2008Oct/0183.html

I believe the question of whether or not the WebKit tree should  
contain EOT support warrants discussion with the WebKit community.  A  
patch is being worked on to add EOT support to the CSS @font-face  
directive.

https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=20542

Right now Apple, Opera and Mozilla are all opposed to adding EOT  
support to Safari, Opera and Firefox.  If this code lands in WebKit,  
it will not be used in Safari (or compiled by default).

Our code contribution guidelines found here:

http://webkit.org/coding/contributing.html

contain the following clause:

"In rare cases a patch may be permanently rejected, meaning that the  
reviewer believes the feature should never be committed to the tree."

I believe this to be one of those rare cases.  Before making this  
decision, however, I would like to hear from representatives for the  
other WebKit ports.  In the absence of any strong vendor support, I do  
not believe we should add this code to the WebKit tree.  If some  
vendors do express a pro-EOT sentiment, I'll let them speak first  
before responding with the case against EOT.

Thanks,
dave
(hyatt at apple.com)