- From: John Daggett <jdaggett@mozilla.com>
- Date: Thu, 18 Jun 2009 18:42:48 -0700 (PDT)
- To: Chris Wilson <Chris.Wilson@microsoft.com>
- Cc: www-style@w3.org
Hi Chris, >> If today's font foundries aren't willing to trust their customers, >> they will be replaced by companies that are. > > That's a rather scorched-earth philosophy. How many talented font > hinters (read: people capable of making readable body-text-size screen > fonts) do you think there are in the world? > > I read this idea as a realization that hey, TTF/OTF was not designed for > this scenario; maybe it doesn't actually give enough information FOR > this scenario. You know, rather than dismissing out of hand the idea > that maybe a more targeted, cooperatively designed solution might need > to be developed. On this point, actions speak louder than words. Rather than kvetch about TTF/OTF direct linking, it would help things immensely if Microsoft were to publicly participate in discussing these matters and make improvements in Internet Explorer to make using @font-face less painful than it is today. After simply pushing EOT as "the answer" to this problem, very little has been done by Microsoft to participate in cooperative discussions of the solution. I'm thinking mostly of the Microsoft Typography folks who were pushing the original EOT plan, not the IE folks per se. The Typography folks didn't attend the TPAC discussion last fall and appear to have lost interest after the EOT proposal was rejected. It's hard to listen to dictates on the solution here when Microsoft seems disinclined to participate in finding a solution at the same time other Microsoft API's such as Silverlight actively highlight their support for linking to TTF fonts. Simply quoting captive IE market share numbers as your trump in determining "consensus" is not really a valid metric. Better support for @font-face features [1], even if just for EOT, and active participation in discussions would be much more helpful. Regards, John Daggett Mozilla Japan [1] Feature improvements needed in IE @font-face implementation: * support for font-weight, font-style descriptors * Postscript CFF font (.otf) support in t2embed.dll * better tools than WEFT for making EOT versions of fonts (including not crashing when .otf fonts are present)
Received on Friday, 19 June 2009 01:43:27 UTC