Re: A way forward

On Fri, Jul 24, 2009 at 5:32 PM, Sylvain Galineau<sylvaing@microsoft.com> wrote:
>> From: www-font-request@w3.org [mailto:www-font-request@w3.org] On
>> Behalf Of John Daggett
>
>
>> This issue of a new font format is *entirely* a licensing issue.  My
>> point was simply that EOT-Lite potentially affects the choice of fonts
>> available in non-IE browsers, since those font vendors who require
>> same-origin checking in *all* cases would not be able to license their
>> fonts for web use (or would need to require things like referrer
>> checking) because of this structural limitation.  Creating two font
>> files, a legacy EOT and a new format .webfont/ZOT, is a pain but
>> it does not have this limitation.
>
> If we thought roostrings were too much of a burden for authors and web sites, requiring
> them to handle both rootstrings and a second format should be quite unattractive for many.
>
> Any authors I haven't scared away yet willing to chime in ? :) (Tab...I know you're out there...)

Two formats where I am required to send *both*, for any reason, suck.
If that's what we're going to have to deal with, then nuts to this
whole process and I'll stick with EOT and TTF.

The whole point of EOT-Lite is to give us a quick consensus format,
and then we can build a more ideal format without time pressure.

Yes, we authors are going to have to work around IE quirks.  And?
That's a fact of life.  IE6 blew, IE7 blew only slightly less, and IE8
is nice but behind the times.  For now, though, the quirks we have to
deal with aren't horrible.  So we have to omit the format argument.
We know the format anyway, it's EOT-Lite.  So we don't get proper
support for font descriptors in @font-face.  IE can still synthesize
italic and bold faces, and we'll get the full effect in more modern
browsers.  I've gotten most of the advertising department to look at
things in FF anyway; it's only really QA that views my code in IE, and
they'll accept "That's the best I can do.".

These problems are, in the grand scheme of things, not horrible.
They're nothing compared to me having to drop in a conditional comment
to tell IE that something should be display:inline, just to make it
act like an inline-block that everyone else knows about.  That's
actually intrusive on my workflow - I have to drop into HTML rather
than authoring everything in a separate CSS file.  *But I deal with it
so I can get the job done.*

EOT-Lite means that in the very near future I'll have webfont support
from a single file that doesn't annoy me.  Sort of crappy because of
browser bugs, but browser bugs I can deal with.  That's my job.  Any
proposal that involves *only* a new format is taking that ability away
from me, and I'm not happy about that.

Just... just do what you have to do to get me fonts as quickly as
possible.  EOT-Lite doesn't violate the GPL, it's not hard to parse,
and it's really not a big deal at all.

~TJ

Received on Friday, 24 July 2009 22:48:09 UTC