RE: FW: EOT-Lite File Format

>From: www-font-request@w3.org [mailto:www-font-request@w3.org] On Behalf
>Of John Hudson
>Sent: Saturday, August 01, 2009 10:29 PM
>To: www-font
>Subject: Re: FW: EOT-Lite File Format


>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.

I do respect Roc's extremely well-informed opinion but we - at least I- may
wish to do more due diligence. It was not so long ago that arguments were leveled
against EOT's rootstring feature on two grounds: first, that they are
painful to manage in practice and unlikely to be used when other methods,
while not as reliable, already exist that are used to protect other resource
types from hot-linking and other abuse. Second, that a user agent which
ignores such rootstrings might be circumventing access control measures
under the DMCA. As a non-lawyer who has no way of judging the validity of
the latter concern when - it has only been asserted by other non-lawyers so far -
I remain confused by the apparent 180, from : rootstrings are unusable in practice,
and ignoring them might be illegal. To: roostrings are better than the alternatives,
it is perfectly OK to ignore them.

Again, I won't dwell on the legal angle and will leave that topic to those who do
have actual expertise in the matter. But I'd love to hear more about the alternatives
to rootstrings for cross-domain access control purposes and the workflows involved
so that I get a better understand of what 'sucks'.

Received on Sunday, 2 August 2009 19:46:58 UTC