RE: What constitutes protection [was: About using CORS]

There is a big difference between fonts and other media such as video and images (as John Hudson has already mentioned on more than one occasion). An author may want to link a video to his website for others to see, but linking to a font is something he would only do if the author himself wants to use it. Fonts are tools for authors, and not a media that his visitors can consume.

Regards,
Vlad


From: www-font-request@w3.org [mailto:www-font-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Robert O'Callahan
Sent: Tuesday, May 04, 2010 2:13 AM
To: Anne van Kesteren
Cc: John Hudson; Sylvain Galineau; www-font@w3.org
Subject: Re: What constitutes protection [was: About using CORS]

On Tue, May 4, 2010 at 5:57 PM, Anne van Kesteren <annevk@opera.com<mailto:annevk@opera.com>> wrote:
Quite surprised to hear that authors actually complained about not being able to link video files cross-origin. Did not expect that. I wonder if fonts have reached enough critical mass yet that sites with special servers for static resources and content distribution networks etc. have started using them. Would be interesting to know what they think.

Yes, there was a big kerfuffle over video. A few reasons why video is probably different from fonts:
a) video is huge, so much more likely to need CDN support or at least to be placed on dedicated servers. Fonts are much smaller so it's generally going to be easy to serve a font on the same server as the rest of the normal page content.
b) people want to put links to "viral videos" in their blogs. I don't see "viral fonts" as being such a big cultural medium, but even if they are, people can copy them around easily enough.
c) there is a well-established precedent with Flash and Quicktime that you can link to videos cross-site. There is not such a well-established precedent for fonts.
They might not like it for instance if stripping of some headers by an intermediary renders the site in some horrible fallback font. It seems same-origin licensing requirements would also be a problem for these sites.

We shall see what authors say, but if you want to increase reliability it's a matter of copying the font to your own server, which is probably not a big deal. That protects you from the other site being down as well.

Rob
--
"He was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed. We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all." [Isaiah 53:5-6]