Re: Minutes, 16 February 2011 WebFonts WG telcon

On Feb 19, 2011, at 8:09 PM, Sylvain Galineau wrote:

>> This argument (and Vladimir's similar one) assumes that today's popular
>> forms of commercial font licenses are not only the common case today, but
>> will be the common case for as long as the Web exists. I don't have
>> evidence that this assumption wrong. But what's our level of confidence in
>> this assumption? 90%? 99%? I think it would take a high degree of
>> confidence to rebut the default assumption of consistency.
> 
> I can't make predictions for 'as long as the Web exists' and I very much 
> doubt anyone here can. But I'm extremely confident that it's much easier 
> to relax a restrictive default in the future without harming anyone than 
> it would be to go the other way. 

I think once we have a high volume of content making use of this feature, we will not be able to change the default in either direction. We can't change a loose default to a restrictive default, or pages are likely to break. But if we change a restrictive default to a loose default, it will probably introduce security issues. That's why I am treating this as a "for all time" decision and not a "for today" decision.

Regards,
Maciej

Received on Sunday, 20 February 2011 06:21:00 UTC