Re: the alternative?

On Aug 24, 12:08am, Erik van Blokland wrote:

> Liam Quin:
> >Consider the possibility of a `purchase this font' button in Netscape or
> >Microsoft Interenet Explorer -- it looks in the font for the URL of the
> >vendor & the foundry, and offers to connect you...
>
> ""PAY 5 DOLLARS AND SEE THIS AD THE WAY IT WAS INTENDED!""
>
> Who would pay money to buy the Kodak font, or the CocaCola font?

Kodak, and CocaCola respectively.

Having the viewer pay is one model. Having the corporation who are trying to
promote a corporate identity pay is another, complementary model. This is
easier, since they are accustomed to paying for this anyway in their print
publications.

Once HTML pages can contain references to fonts, large websites will be hiring
type designers just like they hire graphic designers now, to give their siteas
a particular look that stands out from the crowd.

> Advertising and corporate identity are two good reasons to develop better
> typographic tools for the web, but it is in the advertisers' and
> publishers' advantage to use particular fonts. The person viewing the
> webpage is largely indifferent. A company with a web presence might not
> even want to sell a font to a user. They just want to be able to let the
> font be used on the viewers' screen, not donate or sell it to him.

Right, exactly. As you say, the corporate customers want the viewer to see the
right font on screen. Although the particular case of the "CocaCola" script
font (or worse, the K in Kodak) are probably not good examples, since these are
logos and would be better transferred as inline vector graphics (converted to
curves) rather than as text plus a font reference.




-- 
Chris Lilley, W3C                          [ http://www.w3.org/ ]
Graphics and Fonts Guy            The World Wide Web Consortium
http://www.w3.org/people/chris/              INRIA,  Projet W3C
chris@w3.org                       2004 Rt des Lucioles / BP 93
+33 93 65 79 87            06902 Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France

Received on Monday, 26 August 1996 13:35:08 UTC