w3c
Add font-template-descriptor to WOFF2 or any further web-font standard
Right now web-fonts force web-programmers and designers set information about particular features supported by web-fonts through the set of @font-face rules. We can make web-fonts to be more convenient by unifying their compilation (baking) procedure. During such procedure we can read original font-tables of the fonts in platform-specific way, and create short description of all properties that matters for web engines.
weight1, weight2 // supported font-weight range
stretch1, stretch2, // supported font-width / font-stretch range
(width1, width2),
style1, style2, // supported visual alternatives italic / oblique
language // supported languages
unicode_ranges // supported unicode-ranges (unicode-blocks)
e.t.c
If such descriptor will be placed in position that is close to start of the font file then we will be able to start font-matching procedure even before we will get full contents of the web font file, by parsing the first received byte chunks.
From web-programmers and designer perspective, it will reduce the size of CSS in web documents. Also it will potentially solve some bugs that may appear due to user sets some capability in @font-face rule that woff2 font file can not support.
