- From: Levantovsky, Vladimir <Vladimir.Levantovsky@MonotypeImaging.com>
- Date: Mon, 17 May 2010 05:24:00 -0400
- To: Chris Fynn <cfynn@gmx.net>, www-font <www-font@w3.org>
On Sunday, May 16, 2010 10:17 PM Chris Fynn wrote: > > How many font users are actually going to know what an "OS/2 > table fsType field" is and what fsType settings are? > > IMO None of this would be of any real use unless written in plain > language that most users can understand > > - Chris > My point exactly [1]. It's likely that none of the font users will ever see this spec or any other font specification, and they may have no idea that fonts have permissions bitfield that should be set in accordance with the font license. Therefore, it is our job (in the best interests of users, btw) to include the spec language that would say in plain English that: - User Agents should not be concerned with permission bit settings. UA receives the content and downloads all necessary resources to display the content as presented. If a font is among downloaded resources, it should be used to render and display the text as intended by the author - there is no need to second-guess author's intent or actions. - Authors are expected to use fonts that are legitimately licensed for web use. They may have no knowledge of embedding permissions therefore it is only a benefit if a tool they use to produce web content will inform them of this permission settings. Tools would not be required to restrict authors, just to inform them of the specific conditions. In particular, if the font in question has "Restricted License Embedding" set (which is IMO should never be the case for such use), the tool would simply inform the author that this is the case and suggest to contact a vendor to obtain proper permissions (doing this in strict accordance with the font specification). It would then proceed and create a WOFF file as instructed by the author. For this to happen, the WOFF specification has to say it. We deal with technology and not with law - fonts already have permissions bits that are defined by the technical specification (OpenType / OFF). We need to instruct the UA to ignore them and the WOFF creation tools to tell a user what the settings are. Regards, Vladimir [1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-webfonts-wg/2010May/0086.html
Received on Monday, 17 May 2010 09:23:45 UTC