Proposal to add standardized variation sequences for chess notation

[Michael Everson]

On 8 Apr 2017, at 13:01, Philippe Verdy <verdy_p at wanadoo.fr> wrote:

> (They ARE using fonts, which shows they want to do this in text. They are NOT using UCS characters, and they do NOT have a coherent model amongst any of their hacks.)
> 
> May be they use fonts,

There is no maybe about it. 

> but is OpenType the best tool for applications to create indexed collections of glyphs?

Standardized variation sequences for specific glyph presentation is a part of our standard. I have implemented this for the purposes described and it works. I implemented it with Williams font and it works. William implemented it in his font on his own and it works. 

What does this have to do with “indexed collections of glyphs”?

> SVG fonts are much easier to develop and change as they want.

Red herring.

> And SVG glyphs are easier to integrate in derived documents.

Nonsense. 

> For implementing a simple game, they don't need large collections. They can more easily integrate photographic features, or 3D features. OpenType implementations suffer from a huge resistance for newer features many features don't work if at the same time the Opentype renderer is not updated on the supporting platform (OS or web browser)

We’re not proposing to “implement a game”. 

> OK there are some new SVG features as well, but they are much more tested than those in OpenType and much better documented, and don't suffer from various propritary extensions (such as font hinting which is definitely not "Open" and extremely poorly documented with many internal tricks made to restrict their use on specific OSes, plus stupid limitations/bugs in the way they were encoded, with no vision at all for their evolution or interaction with other features)...

This has nothing to do with our proposal, or with the current practice of the chess commmunity.

Michael Everson