Re: Downloadable fonts and image replacement

> while I'd personally insist that Opera respects the embedding bits of
> Truetype, the CSS specification cannot do so. This is the job of the
> TrueType specification [1].

I think you are missing a key point, that the fonts are not physically
embedded, when the embedding bits assumed that the font would be
physically embedded, as they would be in a Word or PDF document.

Whilst many web designers seem to strive to create a single, compound
document, the web concept is one of lots of separate resources, that
are, potentially, usable in isolation.  That means that any font
that is "embedded" is a first class web resource and can be fetched
independent of the host document.

The server could protect against casual fetching by using Referer headers,
but note that Referer headers are not popular in some quarters, for
privacy reasons, and some people block them (they allow click trails without
cookies and they allow web sites to see what search engine keywords were
used to find them).

What EOT does is to enforce embedding at a site level, which, at least, 
is likely to correspond to the copyright licensee.

The fact that one needs special handling, to simulate embedding, on the
web means that there is a web standardisation issue for someone to
address.

Received on Thursday, 27 April 2006 20:03:31 UTC