RE: CSS3 @font-face / EOT Fonts - new compromise proposal

At 18:05  -0500 10/11/08, Levantovsky, Vladimir wrote:
>Hi David,
>
>  > If a user-agent is requested to use an embedded font that is
>>  not labelled as freely usable, and that font is not
>>  'obfuscated', the UA MUST refuse to use the font.
>
>If by UA you mean a browser - this can not be the case. UA doesn't know
>up front whether a font is freely usable or not - it will/should use
>whatever embedded font is served, whether obfuscated or not. I would say
>that at this point UA should trust the serving side has done the
>checking and made the right choice.

I'm very happy to simplify this.  I was trying to write what I'd 
heard, not what I wanted.  No checking by the UA.

>
>>  The UA must also implement the access control restrictions, and
>>  respect them if they are used (for anything, not just fonts).
>>   The UA MUST take care that the font is not generally
>>  accessible to other applications while it's being used for
>>  the web site it's embedded for.  The UA should exercise
>>  reasonable care that it's not easy to find in its
>>  non-obfuscated state.
>>
>>  The general font engines SHOULD NOT support the obfuscated
>>  state directly;  the web UA should de-obfuscate before
>>  passing it to the font engine.
>>
>>  For any font downloaded off the web, we recommend subsetting,
>>  and compression.  Whether we need proprietary compression or
>>  something like gzip is good enough would be the subject of
>>  technical discussion.  We would recommend against using fonts
>>  that disallow subsetting (though for the life of me I cannot
>>  see why a font vendor would disallow it, or even why the
>>  capability to indicate that is there).
>
>I understand your premise and I agree with you on subsetting
>restrictions, but I am not sure the recommendation against using full
>font makes sense - what if I use a single font for all my web content
>and there is simply no need to subset it. Why would we recommend not to
>use the font [that doesn't allow subsetting] when it, in fact, should be
>up to a content author to decide. What we probably should do is to
>recommend subsetting whenever possible.

I think that we would recommend subsetting fonts down to the size 
'needed for the use(s) they are expected to have in the web', both 
because it can (substantially) reduce their size as well as reduce 
the appeal of mis-re-use of them.  But of course, if the intended use 
is 'generally over a whole bunch of pages some of which haven't been 
written yet', the size needed may well approach the whole font. 
(Though even then it's possible that entire script systems can be 
removed, if you know your web authors can't write correct Arabic or 
whatever).
-- 
David Singer
Multimedia Standards, Apple Inc.

Received on Tuesday, 11 November 2008 02:15:19 UTC