RE: A way forward

Friday, July 24, 2009 John Hudson <tiro@tiro.com>:

>I really thought we were getting past this impasse.

Ascender's new EOT proposal is what - eight weeks old? "Impasse" is your
interpretation. I don't share it. There are stakeholders in this that are
entitled to have a chance to evaluate the current proposals and have their
say. Those who have opposed the new EOT are, naturally, more than happy to
move on. It gets them off the hook of having to answer why they're so OK
with kicking Web Fonts back five years. I think they should answer for that
to the larger web community and the tech-savvy public.
If you think everything's going to be just rosy if we get past this
"impasse", I think you're greatly mistaken. Then, you'll get chopped up in
endless back and forth discussions. Delay, delay, delay. If you feel
frustrated now, just you wait.
If we're punting this thing back 5 years, what's the rush?

Regards,

rich

-----Original Message-----
From: www-font-request@w3.org [mailto:www-font-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of
John Hudson
Sent: Friday, July 24, 2009 5:33 PM
To: Håkon Wium Lie; www-font@w3.org
Subject: Re: A way forward

Håkon Wium Lie wrote:

> Rather than insisting on others embalming your mistakes from the past,
> you should switch on TTF/OT in IE8. It's done in an hour and Windows
> Software Uptdate can easily transmit the patch by tomorrow morning.

Microsoft have no more incentive to expose their own considerable font 
IP to such a move than they have a desire to expose that of professional 
font makers who, like Microsoft, remain almost entirely hostile to naked 
font linking. I think it is telling that the only browsers supporting 
naked font linking are the ones that don't have any font IP of their 
own. It is easy to be reckless with what other people make.

I really thought we were getting past this impasse. Microsoft don't want 
to support naked font linking. Firefox and Opera don't want to support 
an EOT-related format. I see no sign of either party giving way on this; 
indeed, the positions seem to becoming more solid as time goes on.

So, let's get this .webfont/ZOT working group started so we can move 
forward toward a genuinely interoperable solution that all parties will 
accept.

John Hudson

Received on Friday, 24 July 2009 23:50:06 UTC