RE: WebFonts ready for use

There is nothing stopping web pages from providing a "download font" button if they don't want to embed the font. In fact, if the font is free, that might be preferred by some content providers.

Paul

-----Original Message-----
From: Maciej Stachowiak [mailto:mjs@apple.com]
Sent: Tuesday, April 29, 2008 10:18 AM
To: Brad Kemper
Cc: Paul Nelson (ATC); Håkon Wium Lie; www-style@w3.org
Subject: Re: WebFonts ready for use


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 07:08:08 UTC