RE: CSS3 @font-face / EOT Fonts - new compromise proposal

I'm going to try to summarize what I think I am hearing.  I don't 
necessarily agree or disagree with what this, you understand, I am 
trying to get clarity in at least my own mind.

On the 'serving' side, we are looking for an indication in the font 
that shows whether it's freely usable or not.  The 'allows embedding' 
bit has been suggested, and that free fonts would have this set and 
commercial fonts could have this clear, if they wish.  This isn't 
obviously the right semantics, so that's question one; is this the 
right indicator?

If the font indicates it's freely usable, then the serving side MAY 
serve it as-is (but see below for recommendations).

If it indicates it's not freely available, the serving side MUST 
'obfuscate' the font in the chosen way, and it can/should also use 
the access control methods from the W3C.

If a user-agent is requested to use an embedded font that is not 
labelled as freely usable, and that font is not 'obfuscated', the UA 
MUST refuse to use the font.  The UA must also implement the access 
control restrictions, and respect them if they are used (for 
anything, not just fonts).  The UA MUST take care that the font is 
not generally accessible to other applications while it's being used 
for the web site it's embedded for.  The UA should exercise 
reasonable care that it's not easy to find in its non-obfuscated 
state.

The general font engines SHOULD NOT support the obfuscated state 
directly;  the web UA should de-obfuscate before passing it to the 
font engine.

For any font downloaded off the web, we recommend subsetting, and 
compression.  Whether we need proprietary compression or something 
like gzip is good enough would be the subject of technical 
discussion.  We would recommend against using fonts that disallow 
subsetting (though for the life of me I cannot see why a font vendor 
would disallow it, or even why the capability to indicate that is 
there).
-- 
David Singer
Multimedia Standards, Apple Inc.

Received on Monday, 10 November 2008 18:53:26 UTC