Re: Partial fonts

On Mon, Jul 6, 2009 at 3:59 AM, Erik van Blokland<erik@letterror.com> wrote:
> Folks,
>
> here's an idea for you to shoot holes in. A font is split up into parts,
> existing CSS mechanisms are used to glue them together without any
> javascript or extra coding by the user (beyond the css specification
> anyway).
> The fonts by themselves are pretty useless. They can be reassembled of
> course, but this will take some effort.
>
> http://letterror.com/develop/webfonts/partials/

While it does work wonders at making it difficult to just download a
font and use it, it fails at several points:

1. It places all the burden on the author, who has to deal with
keeping around multiple fonts and complex @font-face rules.

2. It appears that it'll destroy kerning support and the like, which
is a complete deal-killer for composition-heavy scripts like Arabic
and Hindi.  This may be technically fixable, but it won't properly
work right now.

3. It's still purely an obfuscation mechanic, with no benefit to us
authors.  (Many/most of the other proposals give us at least *some*
benefit.)

~TJ

Received on Tuesday, 7 July 2009 00:38:13 UTC