Re: New work on fonts at W3C

On Tue, Jun 23, 2009 at 2:04 PM, Sylvain Galineau<sylvaing@microsoft.com> wrote:
> However, if your goal were to make the largest variety of fonts available for use on the web as soon as possible then this solution, however technically clean, will fall very far from what relatively less clean but low-cost alternatives could achieve. Sure, font vendors may come around some day, or be 'replaced' by others who want to license raw files; if my project deadline was circa 2022 then maybe it'd be easy for me to join Ian and wait for the world to come around to accepting my perfect solution over the merely good enough one.
>
> This is the core trade-off; some of us do not want to compromise on the architecture at any cost. Others believe the potential benefits are worth a compromise.

Services like Typekit attempt to make OTF/TTF "safe" enough for
foundries to accept without browser-side changes, by means of
client-side scripting and possibly other things (sneaky hacks in the
font files? clever server-side scripts?).  Likewise, techniques such
as John Daggett outlined could provide most of the "safety" that font
foundries want in the near future without explicit browser support.
Do you feel confident that these efforts will fail, or that they'd be
significantly technically inferior to what a new font format could do?

Received on Tuesday, 23 June 2009 18:19:14 UTC