RE: Web Fonts

Digging into a compressed file to get one or more of fonts is a security
issue that should be avoided.

We went through this discussion at the Face 2 Face in Amsterdam.

The Web Font spec already allows the usage of @font-face to get a font
from a source and attach a name that is used with the font family. The
specification as is will work if people impelement it. 

<style type="text/css">

@font-face {
    font-family: "Downloaded Font";
    font-style: normal;
    font-weight: normal;
    src: url(Myfont.ttf);
}

.style1 {
    font-family: "Downloaded Font";
    font-size: 12px;
}
.style2 {
    font-family: "Downloaded Font";
    font-size: 24px;
}    


Microsoft implemented this for the .EOT font format. For various
reasons, mostly related to security and embedding rights/font licensing
issues we have chosen to not implement this for loose fonts. 

@font-face tells us where to get the font and we install it temporarily
for the local process while the page is loaded. Page goes away and the
font is uninstalled and goes away.



Paul Nelson
IE Text (Beijing)

 

-----Original Message-----
From: www-style-request@w3.org [mailto:www-style-request@w3.org] On
Behalf Of Ian Hickson
Sent: Thursday, August 24, 2006 4:47 PM
To: Chris Lilley
Cc: David Hyatt; www-style@w3.org
Subject: Re: Web Fonts


On Thu, 24 Aug 2006, Chris Lilley wrote:
>> 
>> Wouldn't it be sufficient to simply support the addition of URIs to 
>> font-family?
> 
> That would be a highly backwards-incompatible change!

Actually, it would be completely backwards compatible, because CSS has
very specific forwards-compatibility rules for exactly this situation. 
It's the same as the way we extended <color> in CSS2.1 and CSS3, it
doesn't break all the previous properties in CSS1.

For example, you could do:

   p { font-family: My Font, Other Font, serif;
       font-family: My Font, url(myfont.zip), Other Font, serif; }

...and it would work in down-level UAs and new UAs just as you would
want.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Thursday, 24 August 2006 10:40:24 UTC