Re: FW: EOT-Lite File Format

I'm not sure that I understand what the concern is about font EULA 
licenses. Font vendors are either going to license their fonts to be 
used with EOTL or they are not, and if they do so it makes no sense to 
do so in a way that presents practical problems for authors to use those 
fonts.

As I understand the current EOTL proposal, it uses a version number that 
does not include rootstrings in the font header. Since the version 
number needs to checked in order to determine that this is a valid EOTL, 
what is the worry that a font will contain rootstrings and the user 
agent will need to make some kind of choice about that to do in that 
case? It seems to me very simple: a font that is a version of EOT that 
might contain a rootstring is not a valid EOTL font and should not be 
loaded by an EOTL conformant user agent.

Font makers are going to need to figure out what kind of license terms 
are appropriate for web fonts, and I suspect that many of them are 
waiting to see what the format looks like first. At the moment, I 
suspect many of them don't even know what the options are.

I really can't see font makers who want to license their fonts for use 
on the web making unrealistic EULA demands on authors, and if they were 
to the authors would not license those fonts.

So, when Robert says that he sees 'only two realistic options'

 1) Referer checking
 2) Rootstrings in the font

The first of which 'sucks' and the second of which is not a valid part 
of the EOTL format, this suggests to me that either the font makers 
require something of the authors that 'sucks' -- in which case authors 
will protest -- or it means that font makers do not require access 
controls on the part of the author and rely on font metadata, 
serialisation, etc. to track linking.

JH

Received on Sunday, 2 August 2009 05:29:54 UTC