- From: Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com>
- Date: Mon, 28 Apr 2008 19:17:45 -0700
- To: Brad Kemper <brkemper@comcast.net>
- Cc: Paul Nelson <paulnel@winse.microsoft.com> (ATC), Håkon Wium Lie <howcome@opera.com>, "www-style@w3.org" <www-style@w3.org>
On Apr 22, 2008, at 8:13 PM, Brad Kemper wrote: > > On Apr 22, 2008, at 2:50 PM, Paul Nelson (ATC) wrote: > >> Given the other discussions on this list with regards to [...] >> sharing embedded fonts between pages, the concept of using raw >> fonts on the internet is still of great concern to commercial font >> vendors. > > What is the danger of sharing fonts between pages, if they could be > somehow verified to be the same font first, which would really be a > prerequisite to doing so (to prevent abuse to the page from another > site's pages). If it is the same font, and only existed in the > browser's RAM, then how can that hurt font vendors? All it does is > prevent the same font from having to load twice. I think Safari/WebKit will indeed load the font once if loaded from the same URL (for example if two documents share a stylesheet referencing the font or if they have different stylesheets referencing the same font URL). We do not attempt to optimize for the case of bitwise identical font files loaded from different URLs - I am not sure this would be worth it. I do not think either form of sharing is precluded by the spec, or security or IP considerations. These are simply transparent performance optimizations. What is not OK (in my opinion) is exposing the font to Web pages that don't have an @font-face rule for it in their stylesheet, or installing it on the system where random documents and applications can see it. That would be a security risk and would not even conceptually be embedding. Regards, Maciej
Received on Tuesday, 29 April 2008 02:18:23 UTC