Hi! Today I made a phonecall to Ed Trager to catch up and discuss the project. Here are my notes from the talk:
Dave explained why the site is being held up - that there are 4 people with SSH access to the new server (me, Ben Weiner, Jon Philips, and Ed Trager) and of them, I am the most free, and I haven't done the work of getting ccHost 5 running with the theme Ben and Aaron made and the font preview program Ed made. Once this is done, the next step will be to consider what to replace ccHost with. Jon has been involved with the creation of aikiframework.org (NOT a wiki framework!) that has just gone live for openclipart.org and this could well be a contender. Ed thinks about replacing ccHost with a custom webapp. The most needed feature is managing the fonts; thats 1 sql table for where the fonts are on disk, and their metadata. Then another feature for font authors/editors, with an OpenID backend so its just tracking who is an editor for what files. The web design and the important system architecture can be reused from Ben Weiner's work on ccHost. Ed is using Drupal for other projects. Dave thought that whatever it is, it must be RESTful for integration with FF and so on. The feature he would think of when looking at suitability is, how easy it will be to implement a user viewing a font, downloading it, modifying on their computer, and then uploading v1.1 with some glyphs changed and some new ones added, as a fork of the original. ccHost supports this, albeit not very well. And then, crucially, the feature would be extended to support the original's author to merge these patches into their trunk. This could be with Aiki or anything custom with a DVCS file store - web.py and django were my immediate thoughts. Ed is very happy with his latest "Font Playground" program, which is a jQuery plugin. He recently met a Nigerian guy in Michigan who has difficulty with the keyboard input for the Nigerian language (a latin variant). With the jQuery framework it is easy for Ed to implement this layout. The next feature Ed plans to add to the playground is using browser feature detection to transparently switch from PNG font rendering to @font-face rendering as used in http://www.oep-h.com/LOF/ (also qith jQuery!). I am happy to support this. Dave suggested the end result of Open Font Library ought to be an online collaborative font editor. http://code.google.com/p/svg-edit/ shows great promise in that direction, if we can do the system architecture for the collaborative and font specific aspects - Ed mentioned that the http://wenq.org/ font project already has such an online font editor, eg http://wenq.org/index.cgi?Canvas#U251F8 Cheers Dave