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Minutes of Meeting 3, 2020-09-21, 16:00–17:30 UTC

  • via Google Meet
  • Chair: Liang Hai
  • Note takers: Simon Cozens, Elika Etemad (fantasai), et al.

Resolutions

  • Default to GitHub for substantive discussion, modify charter to reflect that
  • Create GitHub repo under W3C organization e.g. w3c/font-text
  • Charter approved (with edits mentioned above) in two weeks, unless someone objects.
  • Charter with edits must be made available by the end of day 24 September 2020 to allow for review.

Actions

  • Chris Lilley to create w3c/font-text (and migrate the issues if possible) within 3 days

Attendance

It’s known that there were 35 participants at 17:19:20 UTC, however we didn’t get to capture all the names. Liang has reconstructed the following list from the meeting notes, etc. FTCG members are marked with asterisks

  • Adam Twardoch
  • Behdad Esfahbod (*)
  • Bobby de Vos
  • Chris Lilley (*)
  • Christopher Chapman (*)
  • Dave Crossland (*)
  • David Corbett (*)
  • Dominik Röttsches (*)
  • Duncan MacMichael
  • Elika Etemad
  • Erwin Denissen
  • Greg Hitchcock
  • Jean-Baptiste Morizot (*)
  • John Hudson (*)
  • Josh Hadley (*)
  • Laurence Penney (*)
  • Liang Hai (Acting Chair)
  • Makoto Murata
  • Nat McCully (*)
  • Ned Holbrook
  • Nikolaus Waxweiler
  • Peter Constable (*)
  • Renzhi Li
  • Roderick Sheeter (*)
  • Sairus Patel (*)
  • Scott Kellum (*)
  • Simon Cozens (*)
  • Toshiya Suzuki (*)
  • Vladimir Levantovsky (*)
  • Zachary Scheuren (*)

Minutes

Standing items

  1. New participants to self-introduce

    • Scott Kellum: Typetura - responsive development
    • Dominik Röttsches: Google - working on Chrome
    • Nat McCully: Adobe, in charge of client/text-related things, including text layout
    • Josh Hadley: Adobe, FDK
    • Nikolaus Waxweiler: Dalton Maag, font engineering
    • Chris Lilley: W3C, CSS4 fonts spec editor, fonts WG
    • Duncan MacMichael: PM of DirectWrite

  2. Record attendance

  3. Review the last meeting’s minutes

  4. Review existing proposals

  5. Schedule the next meeting

    • Liang Hai: Next meeting, provisionally the same time 4 weeks later. We’ll fire up another Doodle poll to confirm, in case there’s a better time slot.

Additional items

  1. Review and ideally approve the draft charter

  • Liang: Last meeting mostly focused on figuring out how to form an organisation. Consensus was to move to CG under W3C guidance. Since then Simon drafted a charter, it's temporary, to kickstart the work. Has been very helpful for the past month. W3C experts provided expertise on how to write draft charter and explained tooling on Github side. This meeting aim is to approve the proposed charter. One main point is that it is not meant to be long-term and static. Just want to kick-start our work, with a minimum understanding and avoid accidental problems for corporate participants with strict legal departments and don’t want to step into patent issues. W3c structure provides minimal coverage of legal issues. We are proceeding carefully to be respectful of people employed at companies with legal departments wary of patent risks, and who can therefore not attend informal meetings. If we just go ahead and do technical contributions, new standards etc., then many corporate employees will have to back off because their legal departments will find it risky to allow their employees to participate. So we started thinking we needed to clarify a strictly defined scope for the group. Slowly we realised we don’t have to carry out any projects in the single group and can spin off new groups for specific technical projects and contributions and for a specific subset of people to participate in that. So the FTCG should be relatively stable. Envisage it like a triage area - we have a thorough understanding of how it works, we don’t just have field-specific knowledge, but we want to make every link work together. We identify issues and accept proposals but we don’t necessarily have to work on those issues under this group’s coverage and can spawn subgroups. Legally they have their own charter.

  • Simon: Worked with Liang and Florian (who provided a template). Aims to produce a space to everyone to participate without legal issues by not allowing technical contributions. The aim is to produce another charter. Work out the best structure for us to do what we want to do. Major question: whether a new charter should replace the existing charter, or to spawn new groups. (Walking through the draft charter…)

  • Lorp: Introductory sentence tortured. Grammatical change - “such as” to the end.

  • Liang: Split the current Scope section into Goals and Scope of Work, according to the template. Per the template, a single sentence to add at the beginning of the Deliverables section there will be no specifications produced.

  • Laurence: The Font and Text community group gathers individuals and organizations interested in discussing and developing specifications and implementations for technologies, which operate on and at the interface between text encoding and font formats, such as shaping and layout. The "such as … layout" clause is what I am moving to the end. Otherwise it is ambiguous

  • Liang: Can we default to GitHub for all communication/discussions and only reserve the mailing list for announcements and meeting minutes and other archival purposes.

  • Chris and Elika: Clarified what consensus means. Not necessarily a full agreement, but do try to avoid strong opposition.

  • Liang: We don’t anticipate much strong controversy because this CG is meant for discussions and spawning new groups.

  • Lorp: Should specify liaison relationships with other groups, in particular OTFontVar and MPEG/OFF. Are subgroups spawned by FTCG expected/allowed to take the place of some of these other groups?

  • Chris Lilley: A charter typically has a section about liaison.

  • (Liang didn’t manage to properly take notes for some time. No resolutions were produced during this.)

  • Simon Cozens: ( Reviews contributions section of charter) (Reviews how chair is selected / replaced) (Reviews amending the charter)

  • Nat: Clarify what “technical contribution” means.

  • JH: What if the chair misbehaves? Fantasai: Recall the chair or escalate.

  • Liang Hai: Chair selection, each organization gets only one vote.: Also, note that one can join CG even without employer confirmation, but to make contributions W3C will need to confirm their approval.

  • Simon Cozens: Suggestions for changes, fix up intro sentences.: Rearrange in terms of goals.

  • Liang Hai: Clarify deliverables, not including any technical specifications.

  • Simon Cozens: Move up with legal considerations.

  • Liang Hai: Most ppl unlikely to read … except lawyers.: We’ll guide newcomers to work with others. It’s not practical to expect everyone to read this, but still we try to make it as readable and concise as possible.

  • Simon Cozens: Apologies for the bureaucracy, but this is what we need to do to bring people on board.

  • Liang Hai: Any further suggestions?

  • Chris Lilley: One stray mention of Working Group that should be Community Group (“consensus of the Working Group as” -> should change to CG)

  • Liang Hai: Wrt Github, do we default to GH or not?

  • Simon Cozens: Later on, we can say we don’t use mailing list for discussions. Down in Contribution Mechanics.

  • Liang Hai: When you start really talking about specific projects, already getting deep. Discussions leading to that decision that is higher-level / conceptual, painful to track in the ML. Just really want to reserve the ML for only the management purposes. Make it very clear that all discussions happen in GH repo. You still join CG and get archival and announcements from the ML. Clear boundary between the two.

  • Lorp: Might want to give newbies suggestions on how to do things like subscribing to all discussions vs ones you’re participating in. Not everyone is familiar with using GH for general and specific discussions.

  • Simon Cozens: (Responding to comment in chat from Sairus) "Without knowing the type of decisions it is difficult to know how agree to decisions.": Decisions we will make in this new CG are just about “do we want to talk about topic X in group Y or not”.

  • Liang Hai: This is basically a meta group. We might someday turn it into an actual project group. Much more lightweight to treat as a meta group. It’s a triage group: everyone comes to discuss ideas, and we spin off quickly in a lightweight fashion. We can be a very helpful central point for the industry. Where to get consultants / expertise? Who knows anything from encoding to shaping? Industry can have a chance to be less fragmented.

  • Liang Hai: Oh, haven’t formally approved the charter.

  • Simon Cozens: Might want to let ppl sit with it

  • Liang Hai: So leave it for a week or two. Can we take this offline?

  • Chris Lilly: Who wants more time? For yourself or for others?

  • Vlad: Roll it into the draft charter

  • Liang Hai: But we wanted to make a few edits. Maybe ppl wanted to see the final version.

  • Simon Cozens: Some people couldn’t join CG unless they got this cleared by their legal department. If this was you, can you clarify whether this will allow you to join the group?

  • Chris Lilley: Think this is covered by a combination of the CLA and charter. You can join until you make contributions, we’re not making technical deliverables.

  • Liang Hai: If we start documenting all the other discussion groups, definitely that’s not a technical contribution. What if we start documenting all the known bugs in the software, or is that something only specific companies’ legal departments will decide? Or is there a general boundary we can follow?

  • Elika: Don’t think filing bugs creates patent licensing obligations.

  • Peter Constable: CLA states it’s for contributions to developing a specification.

  • Ned Holbrook: As someone whose legal department is putting us on hold, will let you know if there’s any issue. We don’t see any issue if the goal of the group is to discuss where to break out for technical development.

  • Simon Cozens: Thanks, that’s exactly the sort of thing I wanted to hear.

  • Liang Hai: So should we resolve now or wait?

  • Elika Etemad: Resolve conditional on nobody objecting within the next two weeks.

D: Charter approved (with edits mentioned above) in two weeks, unless someone objects.

  • Vlad: Shouldn’t we wait for edits
  • Liang Hai: We’re doing way too much bureaucracy for such a group already. Seems reasonable.: W3C’s decisions are never final, so it is not necessary to find a final final.
  • Vlad: But would need to review the edited charter.

RESOLVED: Charter with edits must be made available by the end of day 24 September 2020 to allow for review.

  • Liang: Let me summarize next steps. We’re going to roll out revised charter in 3 days, and everyone to review, and then if we hear no objection, we’ll approve that offline.: Can we start the GH repo within 3 days as well, so we have a clean start for the discussions? Chris, can you migrate for us?
  • Chris Lilley: Sure.
  • Liang Hai: In that case, the new draft will live there, and we can review it there and approve there. Sound good?
  • ACTION: Chris Lilley to create w3c/font-text (and migrate the issues if possible) within 3 days
  • Liang Hai: We should move our CG discussions over to the GH repo. First discussion would be approving the charter.
  • Vlad: All other discussions will remain where they are.
  • Liang Hai: Yes. We’ve been using the MPEG ot-spec ML with their permission up until this point. Now trying to migrate to GH. So discussion for this CG should migrate within 3 days. But MPEG ot-spec ML will live on for its own purpose, particularly the OFF standardization discussions. You’re always willing to discuss relevant topics there, and Vlad will be happy to help you participate.: [email protected] will be reserved for announcements and archival notes and stuff. If we want to discuss something, please use the GH.
  1. Confirm the move of discussions to GitHub’s issues system
  • Liang: Renzhi Li suggested creating a website like Discourse, but that’s a forum. Want to start light. We’ll start with GH. Discourse has been successful for some groups, but too early to start with one more thing, when we already need to use GH and already have an ML. Confusing enough. We don’t have that many issues to discuss
  • Liang: Do we have consensus to discuss in GH?

RESOLVED: default to GH for substantive discussion, modify charter to reflect that.

  • Liang Hai: Originally thought we’d create a GH organization, but the latest suggestion from W3C folks was to create a GH repo under W3C, to benefit from W3C tooling. If we need additional repos for something, I’m sure they’ll be happy to create those for us. Does that sound concerning to anyone?: So we will create a repo w3c/font-text and our discussions will be in that repo’s issues tracker.: If no objection, then will record consensus.

RESOLVED: Create repo under W3C organization e.g. w3c/font-text

  1. Discuss potential projects at this stage
  2. Summarize recent discussions on the MPEG-OTSPEC mailing list
  • Liang Hai: Lots of discussions on ot-spec ML. Can anyone summarize? Kind of liaison report. We can do this in the future also, so we can all be in sync. Any volunteers to summarize ot-spec discussions?
  • Dave Crossland: One of the primary issues is the role of the MPEG group GH issue tracker.: Another is availability of editors draft of MPEG spec.: Another is the potential of one of the groups, for this CG under discussed charter, to spawn a subgroup to work on font format specs themselves. Seems there’s two camps: some ppl would see this font-text group spawn a group to draft a next-generation font group, other camp would like to see the existing MPEG group to do that.
  • Vlad: The attempt to form a group to work on font format spec is technically out of scope for this group.
  • John Hudson: Out of scope for which gorup?
  • Vlad: Out of scope for this community group.
  • John Hudson: Says we cannot do that work. Does it say we can’t spawn other groups?
  • Peter Constable: This group doesn’t have sub-groups, the goal is to create groups elsewhere.
  • Dave Crossland: My point was basically that this is a point of ambiguity, and is being discussed on ot-spec.
  • Vlad: Goal for this group is to operate at the interface between font format and [?], not to create font format spec. Can create proposals to go into OpenType, but can’t move it elsewhere without ISO’s agreement.
  • Liang Hai: That’s only possible with sub-committee agreements, and SC will participate with member companies voting. We’re trying to improve things from the OT Spec itself to various implementation issues. How exactly to do that, trying to figure it out. Trying to provide this CG to discuss this openly and efficiently.: Have we decided to start a war? No. Might we someday? We don’t know yet.: New organization is to allow people to think about these things with industry-wide participation. We want to improve the situation in one way or another.
  • Vlad: Agree, and an ad-hoc group as it exists today, will be open to any and all contributions to improve the spec. No doubt about that.
  • Liang Hai: Cooperation between CG and the ad-hoc group is sending topics to consider. OT is the foundation alongside the Unicode Standard. Need to keep thinking about how CG should work with the ad-hoc group.
  • Adam Twardoch: W3C OFF/X group was created [in 2013], it was very loose, just a proposal. But agreed with Vlad that this group cannot work on OFF, because that is an ISO standard. Also we approved a charter that we’d work on charter(s). Obviously we cannot say what will or will not be proposed for the scope of these charters, but overall I think everyone agrees that we, altogether, want to improve this format that we all use. We’re fortunate to have a common font format, and don't have competing unrelated formats. We should look for ways to provide the best, most harmonious way to move forward. And this place is one place that can discuss this.
  • Dave Crossland: You said OpenType. Want to distinguish MSFT OpenType from MPEG OFF. Might need to correct the record.
  • Liang Hai: Most of us care about it from an implementation point of view. From standardization procedures, we need to distinguish that, but if we need to make our proposals from this group, to the spawned group, to OFF or to MSFT OT.
  • Simon Cozens: While there’s a lot of emotional and technical heat around font formats at the moment, there will hopefully be one small potential project. I’m not here for a new font format. I’m here for shaper specs/implementations. I hope we keep in mind there are other things to solve as well.
  • Liang Hai: Started with trying to summarize the ML discussions. Anything new?: One more discussion of Eric Muller about the difficulty of joining the CG. Think we’ve mostly clarified that. You can basically join the CG without your employer’s agreement as long as you … you will need to be appointed by your organization’s rep, or you join by affiliation of some employer, but without [?]:
  1. Nominate chairs