Re: New work on fonts at W3C

On Mon, Jun 22, 2009 at 3:21 PM, Jonathan Kew<jonathan@jfkew.plus.com> wrote:
> On the other hand, given that current (or very near-future) versions of all
> the main non-MS browsers will be supporting .ttf/.otf files (and not .eot
> files), perhaps foundries that are willing to license fonts for web use
> should consider John Daggett's recent suggestion, which as I understand it
> would work with today's browsers: create the desired "fences" simply by
> appropriate font naming. For example, the Monotype EULA that permits .eot
> use on a web server could also permit .otf use on a web server provided the
> font is internally renamed along the lines John suggested. That would (it
> seems to me) serve as a pretty clear "No Trespassing" sign, too, and would
> allow sites to be both IE-compatible and FF/Opera/...-compatible in their
> font deployment. Used in this way, direct linking to .otf files need not be
> suitable *only* for free fonts.

However, this would allow anyone to copy the font over to their domain
and have it work on their site (not necessarily knowing that this
violates its license terms).  Various font foundry representatives
have expressed concern with this possibility, IIRC, in addition to
people downloading the font file to their own computer.

I imagine that some innovative soul will come up with a solution that
gives font foundries enough (perceived) security that they'll be
willing to allow some form of OTF/TTF for some of their fonts, though,
just because that's the only way stuff will work *now*.  Here's at
least one attempt in that direction that's been mentioned:

http://blog.typekit.com/2009/05/27/introducing-typekit/

They don't seem to have released any implementation details, though,
so it's hard to say if they actually address all the foundries'
concerns.  The solution apparently requires JavaScript, and hosts the
fonts centrally.  I'd guess that it's arranged so copy-paste of the
code to a non-customer's site will fail somehow (should be doable,
given the JS requirement), and so that it's not easy to get a simple
link to the font that actually works consistently.  I'd expect it's
possible for some such arrangement to satisfy all font foundries'
concerns about as well as EOT does.

Received on Monday, 22 June 2009 20:48:17 UTC