On 06/16/2014 09:34 PM, Jet Villegas wrote:
Hi All:
We need a path forward on the deployment of Icon fonts in FxOS. The Gaia team
understandably wants to squeeze every bit of performance on their apps in v1.4:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=951593
We are concerned about leaking these fonts into Open Web content, so we want to
restrict it to certified Gaia apps:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1008458
The approach we take to restrict icon fonts to certified Gaia apps is under
some debate, and we've got 4 possibilities:
1. Let people use the icon fonts anywhere. (ie. like "MS WingDings" can be used
for this purpose)
2. The patch in bug 1008458 introduces "private" fonts that use the Unicode
Private Use Area (PUA) for icon glyphs.
3. Use PUA characters as per bug 1008458 but disable use of PUA characters in
local fonts on all platforms except for FirefoxOS certified apps.
4. Use the OpenType discretionary ligatures ("dlig") feature to hide the glyphs
( see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1008458#c22 )
I'm afraid of the amount of code in the patch for bug 1008458 for the 1.4
release, so I'm inclined to let the Gaia team use the icon font as-is (option
1) with the promise that they won't use it in uncertified non-system apps.
I also propose that we make any required code changes in v2.0 so that
non-certified apps can't get unrestricted use of the font. All the options
proposed (#2,3, or 4,) have drawbacks, the common one being that they may be
overly restrictive.
I'd like some feedback here, first on my proposal that we go with Option 1 for
1.4. Second, I'd like us to solve the font leakage problem for 2.0 with one of
the 3 other proposals, if still needed--I'd like to see how far we get to
improve SVG performance (bug 999931) to make all this a moot point. I really am
not a fan of icon fonts (see
https://twitter.com/73inches/status/468368206282113024/photo/1 )
Ideally we would like to use SVG instead of Icon Fonts in Gaia for many
use cases. But I believe the SVG performance won't be as good an Icon
Font baked into the platform in the 2.1 timeframe.
3 seems agressive. PUA has always worked on the web AFAIK and it's
unclear to me why we want to changed this.
4 seems like an obfuscation mechanism, which is smart, but won't prevent
what 2 and 3 try to prevent, which is leaking our glyphs on the web.
I'm not saying I like 2 - it always sad when we have to do a
certified-only hack - but it seems the cleaner approach as it draw a
clear line between regular and this "private" font without regressing
things that already works, or trying to hide the feature even if it works.
Then once SVG would be good enough, yes I believe we will use it.
Vivien.
Thanks,
--Jet
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