Re: The unmentionable

We agree more than we disagree.

On Wed, 2009-07-29 at 15:04 -0700, John Hudson wrote:
> Thomas Lord wrote:

> > So does music, as any film maker or collector
> > of Grateful Dead tapes can tell you.

> As for collectors of Grateful Dead cassettes, rarity and exclusivity are 
> not the same thing.

Rarity and exlusivity aren't the same but
there exist a number of exclusively held
tapes and some of those are every now and again
released in commercial form.



> Dirk was talking about retail digital music downloads by consumers, not 
> about specialised markets for new composition, use of music in film or 
> television, radioplay, etc. Stop confusing the matter with totally 
> irrelevant things.

I don't think I'm confusing things.

I think that a web font standard will greatly
expand the non-design-professional, "consumer"
use of fonts.   Fonts look a little bit like
music today, I think they will look a lot more
like music "tomorrow".


> I've been in the font business for long enough to know how it works, 
> know where the value is found in the products, know who the paying 
> customers are, know what happens to fonts in a digital environment, and 
> know what analogies are appropriate and which are not. I can do without 
> people who are not in this business trying to tell me how they imagine 
> it to be. I don't have any idea what the business model for developing a 
> web browser is, and I'm not going to presume to tell the browser makers 
> on this list what their business is. I'd appreciate the same basic respect.


I think you stand to be surprised how a web font
standard will change your industry.  I think that based
on empirical observations such as the one I described
about my experience at CMU.

Also there isn't "disrespect" going on here - there
are engineers expressing best practices of certain 
infrastructure.   For example, root string enforcement
wasn't rejected because nobody on the browser side
cares about the font vendors.  It was rejected because
it would violate long-standing, very deep architectural
principles of the web, principles that long predate 
fonts and that are there for unassailable reasons.
It is surely difficult to convey to a non-engineer
why those principles are in place but they are.  That
is the brick wall you are running into, not a wall
of disrespect.

-t

Received on Wednesday, 29 July 2009 23:12:59 UTC