Re: New work on fonts at W3C

On Jun 24, 2009, at 9:05 AM, Levantovsky, Vladimir wrote:

>
> So you are saying that
> - you would rather continue serve EOT to IE and raw TrueType to other
> browsers,

No, but that won't change until Microsoft starts supporting the same  
formats as Firefox, Safari, and Webkit. If they are going to start  
supporting font formats that they don't currently support, then they  
should start with OpenType and TrueType, absolutely.

> and
> - you would rather be in a position where in order to do that you'd  
> have
> to rename each font file, or

Of course, because I fully expect there to be a simple software tool  
(or command line utility if you prefer) to do the renaming and  
generate the CSS for it. Even your proposals include creating a new  
file with a different file extension in its file name, so this is not  
a significant imposition.

> - you would rather rely on a third-party solutions like TypeKit to  
> do it
> for you, and

I'd rather not. From what I can deduce so far, that adds a lot of  
complexity, and may slow down the page. But I don't really know that  
much about their solution, but I'd prefer to host my own fonts in a  
simple, reasonably straightforward way.

> - you don't mind having uncompressed font files being served from your
> site.

As I mentioned recently, the compression might be worth pursuing on  
its own merits, but has little to do with a conversation about ease-of- 
use. And if I can have uncompressed fonts today with a promise of  
better compressed fonts at some unknown time in the future (once there  
is wide support for them, which I don't expect will be very quickly),  
then I don't mind that over the alternative. It may well be that by  
the time a compression format is well supported, there will already be  
a thriving marketplace of font sales using existing mechanisms. Does  
Monotype not want to be part of that marketplace?

> You would really prefer to do all this rather than
> - compress a font "as is" and create a single CSS module that works  
> the
> same way in all browsers.

Aside from having to support IE, which always hangs like an albatross  
around my neck (not just on this), the process you describe is not  
much different to what I describe.

> Is this what you are saying?

I've been repeatedly clear about what I'm saying.

Received on Wednesday, 24 June 2009 17:19:38 UTC