Re: cutting to the chase

John Hudson wrote:

> > TTF/OTF is widely implemented and used.
> 
> It is reasonably widely implemented. It is hardly used at all.
> 
> EOT is more widely implemented, in terms of the number of active
> browsers being used, and probably still more widely used in terms of
> the number of sites making use of EOTs (especially in countries whose
> scripts have not been well-supported by the availability of 'web safe'
> fonts).

I'm assuming the last line means "India".  The usage of EOT in Indian
has more to do with making the best of poor situation than anything that
should be suggested as an example of ideal usage.  My understanding is
that most of these EOT fonts use custom encoding schemes made up of
precomposed glyph sequences. These are used because the structure of
OpenType requires some level of OS support for complex scripts (as
opposed to AAT which embeds all the information in the font itself) and
that OS-level support is lacking in older versions of Windows.  As
OS-level support improves, the need for burdensome hacks like this will
decline.

The main competition for TrueType usage is not EOT, it's sIFR and other
Flash-based techniques, those have far more traction in the minds of web
authors.  Right now there's a lot more fonts that allow sIFR usage but
don't allow direct linking.  The current EOT font market is a far
smaller, niche market at best.

The existing use of EOT is not relevant to the EOT-Lite proposal.

Received on Monday, 3 August 2009 04:19:09 UTC