Re: What constitutes protection [was: About using CORS]

On Tuesday, May 4, 2010, 5:02:04 AM, Anne wrote:

AvK> I understand where you are coming from, but I don't believe that policing
AvK> the Web will work. 

Its not really "policing the web" and in particular, unlike some earlier proposals, the Web browser itself is not involved in any "policing".


AvK> Even with a new format. It also seems counter and lacks
AvK> in understanding as to how the Web operates. I cannot help but think of
AvK> the media conglomerates trying to persuade our government to be allowed to
AvK> see if the packets users are transferring contain copyrighted material.

I think the problem is that you are seeing the video DRM stuff and assuming that WOFF falls into the same boat. It doesn't.

AvK> Again though let me stress that while I am against a new format, I am not
AvK> at all planning on raising objections against it.

OK, good.

AvK>  If pretty much all  
AvK> browser vendors (including us apparently :-)) want to incur the cost for a
AvK> new format so be it.

That does indeed appear to be the case. Its already shipping in Firefox (with default same-origin) and in PrinceXML, and indications are that its being worked on by Chrome and Opera; hopefully others as well.

There are tools for it - converters (sfnt2woff), font editors (FontForge), checkers (wofftools). There are sites that will host fonts, make the wioff file, and create the @font-face for you.

And there are font vendors licensing fonts in woff, explicitly for use on the Web, under different terms and conditions from (sometimes the same) fonts, licensed for desktop and print use. 

So the (fairly minimal, in this case) cost of a new format has already been incurred and accepted. Besides, its a refactoring of an existing format. Code that already deals with OpenType and already includes zlib (e.g. for HTTP or PNG ot TIFF decompression) really just needs to assemble the existing pieces in a slightly different way.

-- 
 Chris Lilley                    mailto:chris@w3.org
 Technical Director, Interaction Domain
 W3C Graphics Activity Lead
 Co-Chair, W3C Hypertext CG

Received on Tuesday, 4 May 2010 14:02:22 UTC