RE: Fonts WG Charter feedback

On Wednesday, July 01, 2009 5:40 AM Patrick Garies wrote:
 
> Håkon Wium Lie wrote:
> >  It's more likely that we will see a format war along the lines of
> >  BlueRay/HD-DVD or EOT/TrueDoc. In these battles, there are no
> >  winners, but many losers.
> 
> That isn't accurate. Blu-ray won the Blu-ray vs. HD DVD fight just like
> VHS won the VHS vs. Betamax fight. There *are* winners.
> 
> EOT essentially won out over TrueDoc too with the discontinuing of the
> competing format and the fall of Netscape. Despite IE being in a
> dominant position (without serious competition for several years) and
> having supported EOT through six major iterations over more than a
> decade though, authors, apparently, haven't been interested in using
> it.
> One has to wonder why.
> 

I asked many authors the same exact question and what I heard consistently was that no one is interested in using a tool that is not interoperable and is only supported by one browser, even if that browser has over 70% of adoption on the market. 

They also told me that in those environment where IE is dominant (e.g. a corporate intranet with IE-only users) they did use EOT, and had no problems doing it. The authors also told me that they would use it if EOT is supported by other browsers and becomes truly interoperable solution.

Vladimir

> — Patrick Garies

Received on Wednesday, 1 July 2009 13:21:22 UTC