[MPEG-OTSPEC] [EXTERNAL] Re: Request for OFF Github Repo

[Chris Lilley]

I agree that a cleaned up, regularized, audited rewrite of the current 
functionality, which uses terms in a consistent way, would be very 
desirable.

It is also an awful lot of probably thankless work.

I have seen this happen at least twice. Once was the rewrite of PNG 1.1 
lus updates to become the ISO specification for PNG 1.2. I think that 
took about three years, the last of which was checking that the two 
specifications actually said the same thing. The other was the 
subsetting of SS 2 int the interoperably, implemented subset CSS 21 
(plus adding some clarifying details. Just a few. Ahem) which took over 
ten years.

Gating any updates behind successful completion of a rewrite is asking 
for a lot of patience. It may still be the right thing to do. It would 
certainly make discussing the impact and correctness of any new update 
much easier. But are people prepared to either wait that long, or to 
help with a sustained community effort to do unglamorous spec work to 
get it done in a shorter time?

(I also agree that tracking issues in GitHub is vastly preferable to 
tracking them across email archives)

On 2020-09-18 15:40, Adam Twardoch (Lists) wrote:
> the spec is just an incredibly convoluted mess. It fails on basic 
> things like a clean structure, some conceptual modularization, 
> terminology etc. etc. In one place "CFF" means "CFF1" but in other 
> places it means "CFF1 or CFF2". That's just a basic example.
>
> So the spec needs a major reworking **before** this gets into the 
> phase of proposals. Simple amendments won't do, because what we got 
> from simple amendments is more chaos.
>
> It's not at all clear which parts of the format are pertaining to line 
> layout and shaping, which are about glyph rendering, which are about 
> font selection, and which intersect.
>
> OFF sometimes gives high exposure to things that are irrelevant today 
> (e.g. legacy Mac language IDs), sometimes does not give exposure to 
> things that are of high relevance (the actual inter-relations of 
> various entries).
>
> The existing text of the OFF would be helpful as a **reference**, and 
> it would be helpful as a resource from which people can copy-paste and 
> rework, or even gradually mark which things are refactored and which 
> are not.
>
> I think if we ever think about moving towards OFF 2.0, we should first 
> create a new clean structure of the current OFF.So it's an editorial 
> rewrite (refactoring) without any substantial functional changes. 
> Adding clarifications and inter-relations, splitting factual data from 
> "frivolous commentary" (like those ad-hoc comments about some "WWS" is 
> the name table, which are inserted into what is a list of fields.

-- 
Chris Lilley
@svgeesus
Technical Director @ W3C
W3C Strategy Team, Core Web Design
W3C Architecture & Technology Team, Core Web & Media

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