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

On Fri, Nov 14, 2008 at 4:04 PM, Levantovsky, Vladimir
<Vladimir.Levantovsky@monotypeimaging.com> wrote:
> I am afraid your assumptions here are not based on actual facts.

You are most likely correct.  I have an unfortunate tendency to talk
at length about things I don't know anything about, and I apologize
for that.  Even if what I said did have some factual merit, it would
be irrelevant here anyway.  Whether it's 20% or 80% of sites that will
want to use retail fonts hardly matters to the W3C's goals: it's a
significant percentage either way, worth effort to support.  Only a
very small percentage of all web page views are likely to ever involve
videos, but that doesn't make <video> less worthwhile.

It's still worth keeping in mind, though, that even the extreme case
of requiring bare font files for full support doesn't mean no retail
web fonts -- it just means fewer, maybe slower to be made available,
maybe more expensive.  Avoiding these penalties would be good, but
that has to be weighed against the concerns some people have about DRM
on the web, and web fonts being harder to use for authors.  I like
your proposal (provided the patents can be licensed without
field-of-use restrictions) because it doesn't implement any explicit
DRM at all, only things that would be reasonable regardless of piracy.

Received on Saturday, 15 November 2008 23:57:24 UTC