Re: Fonts WG Charter feedback

On Mon, 2009-07-06 at 17:58 -0700, John Hudson wrote:

> TTF/OTF is a font format. I'm going to take the nominalist view that 
> what constitutes that font format is all the TTF/OTF format fonts that 
> exist in the world at any given time.

Ok.


> The very valid concern that font developers have about TTF/OTF as a web 
> font format is that, as Karsten expressed it so well, it turns every 
> very site which employs @font-face into a font filesharing host. And 
> we're not so naïve as to think that 'restrictively-licensed' fonts are 
> not going to be all over those hosts. I and many of my colleagues have 
> served our time policing alt.binaries.fonts, warez sites and torrent 
> uploads. And Dave Crossland has presented a pretty clear view of how 
> difficult it will actually be to police web linked fonts.

Are you trying to argue against having any standard
for web fonts whatsoever?

If not, how does this argument apply specifically to the
case of TTF/OTF as one among more than one required format?

It's seems to me that your "policing" burden is not much
different between one web font proposal and another and 
that therefore we ought to choose among web font proposals
by some other considerations.



> Further, the 'additional format' of which you speak is, at this point, a 
> vapour format with no indication that it would possess any significant 
> security to meaningfully differentiate it from raw TTF/OTF.

What do you mean by "security" and, given your definition,
why do you believe it is achievable by the standards process?

-t

Received on Tuesday, 7 July 2009 04:23:57 UTC