- From: Thomas Phinney <tphinney@cal.berkeley.edu>
- Date: Wed, 5 Aug 2009 13:38:32 -0700
- To: Thomas Lord <lord@emf.net>
- Cc: Jonathan Kew <jonathan@jfkew.plus.com>, Sylvain Galineau <sylvaing@microsoft.com>, John Daggett <jdaggett@mozilla.com>, www-font <www-font@w3.org>
On Wed, Aug 5, 2009 at 12:48 PM, Thomas Lord<lord@emf.net> wrote: > On Wed, 2009-08-05 at 12:28 -0700, Thomas Phinney wrote: >> On Wed, Aug 5, 2009 at 12:06 PM, Thomas Lord<lord@emf.net> wrote: >> >> > The proponents argue for EOTL with same-origin+CORS. >> > The rationales: >> > >> > 1) A required conversion step by authors >> > acts as a low garden wall. >> >> I have never heard this argument until now, and I do not believe that >> font vendors are concerned about that particular direction of usage. > > It's come up quite a bit. The two > "conversion step" rationales are the > entire basis for some parties saying > "no TTF/OTF -- no `raw' fonts". No, the first step as a protection has not come up, and the first conversion step is neither a rationale nor a basis for anything I've seen discussed. It's just a necessity in order to put up the fence of a second step, coming back the other way. (It's true that a garden fence may make it harder to get *out* of your garden, but unless you have pets or small children it usually isn't the point.) Retail font vendors are very concerned about web fonts chewing into their desktop font revenue, because the latter is their main source of revenue. Broadly speaking, they haven't even *considered* the question their existing revenue source (desktop fonts) chewing into the hypothetical future revenue which is about to go up from zero. Arguably, they *ought* to be worried. But they pretty much universally are not, so far. Maybe some of them would be if they thought about it more. >> What UA maker or desktop OS vendor has >> said they want to or are even willing to "automate the conversion >> step" back to desktop fonts for users downloading web fonts? > > I'll write some code for the web-to-desktop case, > if it comes to that. I'm concerned with what's bundled with the Mac and Windows OSes, not with what third parties do. The fact that conversion code will exist and even be widely available is not the issue, just whether it's built in.
Received on Wednesday, 5 August 2009 20:39:17 UTC