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

On Thu, Nov 13, 2008 at 1:50 PM, Dave Crossland <dave@lab6.com> wrote:
> Given the other thread on this list about the details of @font-face
> cascading, I imagine most sites will simply have both EOT and OTF
> versions of their fonts to support all browsers, without IE doing OTF
> and without anyone else doing EOT.

As long as the licensing on EOT is permissive enough that people can
write up modules for lighttpd/Apache/etc. to do translation between
the font types automatically, this solution is stupid but acceptable,
to me as a web developer.  I guess it's the font foundries who would
be the only ones to lose out on that deal, if they aren't willing to
license their fonts to be so translated.

To clarify, the kind of automatic translation I'm looking for is a
rule like "if a file is requested with the (wlog) .eot extension, and
that file doesn't exist, but there's a file with the same name but a
.otf extension in the same directory, automatically convert the OTF
file (likely caching it unless conversion is very cheap) and serve
that".  Then we could just add an extra line to our CSS files for each
font, to give the dummy EOT location to IE, and otherwise forget that
there's any difference between the browsers at all.  And those who for
whatever reason prefer EOT could do the reverse -- as long as the
fonts' licenses permit that transformation.

Received on Friday, 14 November 2008 01:36:44 UTC