RE: question

There were other issues with EOT. A proprietary patented compression
algorithm, same-origin policy enforced by embedding URLs in the file which
was problematic for web sites etc. For all the DRM FUD around the latter,
WOFF does sidestep a number of real technical quirks in EOT. 

EOT's major plus was that it was widely deployed. But that doesn't count
for much in practice if a technology is not also widely used.

What EOT did establish was that obfuscating the raw resource through
compression was in fact adequate for a plurality of font vendors.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Christopher Slye [mailto:cslye@adobe.com]
> Sent: Tuesday, October 12, 2010 10:14 PM
> To: Sylvain Galineau
> Cc: www-font@w3.org
> Subject: Re: question
> 
> Some foundries were interested in standardizing EOT and advocated in
> unison for it. That was called DRM by some browser developers and other
> folks, and rejected partly for that reason. If EOT's mild DRM was DOA,
> why consider stronger, newer, or less familiar DRM?
> 
> Thomas's assessment seems accurate to me.
> 
> -C
> 
> On Oct 12, 2010, at 4:53 PM, Sylvain Galineau wrote:
> 
> >> From: www-font-request@w3.org [mailto:www-font-request@w3.org] On
> >>
> >> "We" being the W3C and browser vendors. Of course many font
> designers
> >> and vendors were very interested in some form of DRM (Digital Rights
> >> Management). But ultimately it became clear that browsers weren't
> >> going to ever implement anything that even smelled remotely like DRM
> >> for fonts, and WOFF emerged as a compromise that delivered useful
> >> things for everyone, even if it didn't come anywhere near meeting
> the
> >> initial desires (DRM) of the folks designing and distributing
> >> commercial fonts.
> >
> > I'm not sure it was that simple. This version of the story assumes
> those
> > font vendors were willing, able and ready to pay for said DRM systems,
> > their deployment and proper management. Something that, imo, is quite
> unlikely
> > to be affordable to small foundries. (And maybe attractive to the
> larger
> > ones for that reason ?)
> >
> > Imo many font vendors who wanted DRM assumed that it would be
> reasonably
> > effective and cost them very little i.e. browsers would do all the
> dirty
> > magic and voila ! 'Secure' fonts! All based on the implied assumption
> that
> > this limited burden would generally result in relatively higher
> revenue.
> >
> > Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but I never noticed the discussion even
> getting
> > into any kind of depth e.g. to answer the question: which DRM
> scheme ? If the
> > 'desired' solution is a bunch of foundry coalitions fighting it out
> through
> > incompatible DRM systems, good luck finding web authors to buy fonts.
> Even if
> > there were only one such scheme, it would have to be able to work
> reliably
> > across browsers, operating systems and from smartphone to desktop.
> Even without
> > the politics, the technical challenge of designing, implementing and
> deploying
> > such a protocol was orders of magnitude larger than specifying an
> encoding like
> > WOFF.
> >
> > Bottom line: yes, there was interest but very little understanding of
> what DRM
> > meant and what it would have cost. Not just to browser vendors, but
> to font vendors.
> >
> >
> >
>

Received on Wednesday, 13 October 2010 18:17:47 UTC