EOT and EOT-based proposals

Over the course of the discussions, I've been convinced that there's
some definite benefits in supporting EOT or some compatible variant as
an interoperable format.

It's clear that, no matter what we do, IE will be the browser that
holds us authors back the most.  Or, to be precise, IE *users* will
hold us back for a long time.  Chris Wilson (from MS, mind you)
estimated that any proposal that requires new work in IE will take, at
minimum, 5-7 years for us authors to be able to reasonably write off
legacy browsers as irrelevant and use the new format confidently.
There's nothing that the IE team can do about this - it's a property
of the simple fact that IE has the highest concentration of
unsophisticated users, who historically are very slow at updating.
IE8, 7, and even 6 will be with us site authors for some time, even if
IE9 implements a consensus proposal with all the other browsers.

So, if it is possible to widely implement EOT or some variant (even as
an interim format while developing an even better format for the
future) we authors get an immediate huge bonus.

So, let's talk details.

First, are there any legal issues preventing any of the other browsers
(particularly Firefox with its GPL obligations) from implementing EOT?
 I don't believe there is any, but I want to make absolutely sure.

Second, according to some remarks by Chris Wilson, an EOT font with no
rootstring should work fine in legacy IEs.  A no-rootstring EOT seems
to be a very basic obfuscation proposal, which is at least somewhat
accepted among the current players.  Is this true?

Third, can we add same-origin restrictions to EOT?  These obviously
wouldn't do anything with legacy IE versions, but it *would* be
interoperable with all new versions of all browsers.

~TJ

Received on Friday, 3 July 2009 04:31:57 UTC