Re: New work on fonts at W3C

On Jun 25, 2009, at 3:22 PM, Robert O'Callahan wrote:

> So browsers that send incorrect headers would fail to work with  
> linked fonts in this scenario? That seems like something browser  
> vendors might be willing to fix.
>
> The big problem is that some firewalls strip Referer headers because  
> they don't want to reveal URLs of internal pages. For example,  
> ifhttps://intranet.mozilla.com/Orbital_Mind_Control_Lasers.html  
> links to http://www.nasa.gov, Mozilla might not want  
> nasa.govadministrators to see that URL in their Referer logs. So  
> Referer is not really fixable.

So the result would be that the Mozilla intranet would see the NASA  
pages without NASA's embedded fonts, then right? For a lot of site  
authors, this might be acceptable, or they might send you a second- 
choice open license font instead. I wonder if it would be acceptable  
to the font publishers. It would not be that different from sites that  
block de-referred browsers from seeing their images.