[css3-webfonts] Interesting example of font-face support

Interesting example of a font shop explicitly enabling font-face usage with Safari:

  http://www.fonts.info/info/press/free-fonts-for-font-face-embedding.htm

The Safari screenshot also shows a really nice use of WebKit's fill and stroke color along with text shadow.

(This was originally noted in a Typophile forum, http://www.typophile.com/node/43971 )

John Daggett
Mozilla Japan
 
----- Original Message -----
From: "Ambrose Li" <ambrose.li@gmail.com>
To: "Patrick Garies" <pgaries@fastmail.us>
Cc: "Paul Nelson (ATC)" <paulnel@winse.microsoft.com>, www-style@w3.org
Sent: Sunday, April 13, 2008 12:33:24 AM GMT +09:00 Japan
Subject: Re: [css3-webfonts] Downloaded fonts should not...


On 12/04/2008, Patrick Garies <pgaries@fastmail.us> wrote:
>
>  Paul Nelson (ATC) wrote:
>
> >  Permanently installing on a remote system is: 1. A security issue. I
> >  could put a style sheet that would fill your device's hard drive so
> >  you could not put anything else on the device. Sorry for the end
> >  user.
> >
>
>  Any file format that's cached can do this; for example, this could be done
> by including an overloaded style sheet document in a UA that doesn't even
> support |@font-face|. Considering that this isn't considered enough of an
> issue with existing formats to result in UA vendors disabling caching
> entirely and UAs can be (and are) used as a barrier to address this issue
> (i.e., cache size limits), I don't see why this would be an issue at all.

IMHO these are still different. When you cache, you likely assume that
- you have a cache limit, and
- cached things will expire automatically (even if there is no
explicit cache limit)

If you "permanently install a font by the UA",
- there is no explicit "install" limit
- "permanent" fonts are not expected to expire without explicit user
intervention

Unless the standard will specify otherwise, this will differ from saving images
by requiring no user consent on the save, and differ from caching by requiring
explicit user consent on the expiry. Thus installed fonts wil be much more
likely than either saved images or cached content to accumulate on the user's
hard drive.

> >  2. A licensing issue. A font may or may not be allowed to be
> >  installed permanently. It all depends upon the EULA. The safest thing
> >  for UAs to do is to temporarily install the font for use with the
> >  page using a memory only install.
> >
>
>  As far as I can tell, this offers no benefit to anyone but copyright
> holders; it hinders the UA for no practical benefit for the user or site
> author.

I agree completely. IMHO downloadable fonts is completely against
the spirit of CSS. Machine-readable EULA's are also known to be
sometimes wrong and cause problems, so I also am seriously
suspicious of its usefulness.
-- 
cheers,
-ambrose

The 'net used to be run by smart people; now many sites are run by
idiots. So SAD... (Sites that does spam filtering on mails sent to the
abuse contact need to be cut off the net...)

Received on Monday, 14 April 2008 02:07:55 UTC