Re: "Save Page As"

Dave Crossland wrote:

> I would consider a particular font to be part of the *content* of the
> web page, just like a background image.

Presumably a background image is not replaceable with a different image 
without altering the content of the page. The text, on the other hand, 
can be displayed and read in more than one font.

Note that I am not saying that a linked .woff definitely should not be 
locally saved -- so long as it is not made available to other 
applications and documents, and remains used only to display the content 
of the particular web page with which it was saved, as stated in the 
WOFF spec --, only that I don't think the parallel you've tried to make 
is compelling, and it remains debatable whether a linked font should be 
considered part of the content of a page.

A font is a delivery and arrangement mechanism for glyphs, and its a 
pretty standard text processing understanding that glyphs are display, 
and hence variable, and characters are content.

Now, if you want to say that the 'Web page, complete' save option is 
intended to faithfully preserve the particular *appearance* of the page 
in the saving browser, and not just the content of the page -- bearing 
in mind that there are no guarantees that the appearance will be the 
same in any other browser used to view the offline content --, then you 
have a case for locally saving the linked fonts. But it seems to me up 
to the individual browser makers to determine the intention of the save 
functions in their products, and the fact that they have chosen not to 
include linked fonts in the saved items suggests to me that they don't 
see preservation of particular page appearance, with regard to preferred 
font, as the intention, perhaps because CSS tends to provide for the 
very situation of displaying the text content in other fonts according 
to a fallback list.


JH

Received on Monday, 22 November 2010 16:09:14 UTC