WebFonts WG Zoom call

We will skip the next call on Aug. 1 and will reconvene the week after, on Aug. 8.

Folks,
The upcoming WebFonts WG meeting will be primarily taken up by a presentation by Skef Iterum on a new "Binned Incremental Font Transfer" prototype developed by Adobe. The schedule has been extended another hour to allow for questions and discussion.

IFTB is, in effect, a pair of font formats, one differing slightly from OTF and one slightly from WOFF2. Each includes an added table that assigns glyphs to independent "bins". The path data for glyphs in a bin can be integrated by downloading a corresponding "chunk" file.

Compared with previous solutions IFTB probably shares the most in common with static subsetting, but avoids the "fragmentation" inherent to that system. As with patch-subset, a user should get the same results as if they downloaded the original font.

Adobe believes the new system meets the same primary use cases as the current (and somewhat stalled) Range Request protocol, those being:

1. Operating with a minimal server-side (i.e. conventional HTTP facilities but no custom code), and
2. High compatibility with CDN caching
   It also feels that the overall costs and benefits of IFTB are superior to those of Range Request.

The purpose of this presentation is to familiarize the working group with the basics of this system and its relevant benefits, in the hope of quickly ramping up to a discussion of whether it makes sense to replace the Range Request specification with some version of this new option.

Weekly recurring WG call, see agenda for details.

Hello WG,
We will have our regularly scheduled WG Zoom call tomorrow, please see the agenda below.

Weekly recurring WG call, see agenda for details.