Erik Dahlström felt compeled to respond to limi’s post about why Firefox will not pass the ACID3 test. Erik’s post claims to bust two myths:
- You need to implement the whole SVG 1.1 Fonts chapter to pass Acid3
- SVG Fonts and foreignObject support are both required to pass Acid3
Let’s be clear here: these two statements were never made by limi, or by bz, whose quote is used in both posts. Erik used only parts of bz’s quote that helped his argument, and conveniently left out this bit:
We don’t particularly want to do that small subset in Gecko, since it gives no benefits to authors or users over the existing downloadable font support (beyond the brownie points on Acid3).
On the other hand, support for the full specification in a UA that also supports HTML is… very difficult. SVG fonts are just not designed with integration with HTML in mind. Once you put an <iframe> in a glyph, all sorts of issues arise — both in terms of the spec being underdefined and in terms of the behavior being very difficult to implement, no matter what the spec said.
The astute reader might notice that Erik used a straw man argument to disprove limi’s post. Luckily, it looks like not everybody on the Internet has fallen for this logical fallacy.