pretty type... on the tinternets
Out of context: Reply #7
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- lukus_W0
I've been reading the discussion about this on the (and ) mailing lists. There's been quite a lot of activity lately about the future of fonts on the web.
Basically it seems that four major browsers manufacturers are happy to roll out new versions of their apps with the '@font-face' method (which Stugoo links to above).
The font foundries themselves are not happy with this because it might make it easy for users to steal fonts. Microsoft won't use it because the font foundries object - and they've been championing their own format (EOT) for sometime now. (The WEFT stuff you link to, is an early implementation of this). They submitted the idea as freebie to the W3C but I afaik it was turned down.
So right now, there are a load of people arguing about a possible solution (three main camps .. the open-source brigade, Microsoft, and some reps from some of the major font-foundries).
The battle seems to revolve around how to appease the font foundries. (e.g. the font companies don't want people visiting cnn.com and stealing fonts from their computer's temp directory).
Lots of different methods have been suggested - most try to deal with the problem by either obfuscation or compression. So font-files would either be placed in some-kind of wrapper (e.g. EOT) or compressed using some kind of proprietary format (Monotype wants their own format MXT to be used), or maybe changing the font-file's meta-data in some obscure way which would make the font unusable in desktop applications.
I reckon the main problem is that the argument is philosophical as well as practical. Microsoft are closed-source and don't like co-operating and giving away their code... the open-source guys are religiously opposed to Microsoft's stance and the font-foundries ideally want to implement DRM for fonts which is as a daft as King Canute trying to turn back the tide.
While there are doubtlessly better ways to spend time, it's been pretty interesting following these developments. I had no idea how these things were decided before I joined these w3.org mailing lists... now I can see just how tortuous the process is.
And right now they're all very very pissed off.