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Will W3C Accept DRM For Webfonts?
dotne writes "Microsoft has submitted Embedded OpenType (EOT) to W3C and a slimy campaign for EOT has been launched. EOT is a DRM layer on top of normal TrueType/Opentype files; EOT ties a font file to a certain web page or site and prevents reuse by other pages/sites. Microsoft's IE has supported EOT for years, but it has largely been ignored due to the clumsiness of having to regenerate font files when a page changes. Now that other browsers are moving to support normal TrueType and OpenType on the web (Safari, Opera, Mozilla, Prince), W3C is faced with a question: should they bless Microsoft's EOT for use on the web? Or, should they encourage normal font files on the web and help break Microsoft's forgotten monopoly?"
"Or, should they encourage normal font files on the web and help break Microsoft's forgotten monopoly?"
/. will think...
Gee, I wonder what
If there's one thing that I wake up every morning with a deep desire to have, it's more random, cutesy, difficult to read fonts on websites.
ZuluPad, the wiki notepad on crack
What...the...fuck?
Next they'll have DRM on colors.
The spec for W3C can say whatever it wants. If the standards body makes a mistake, like blessing useless DRM where it doesn't belong, the rest of the web will kindly ignore the stupid standard. Seriously, IE isn't standards compliant, what would keep Mozilla, Safari, any of the other browsers from simply ignoring this?
Prediction: The real iPhone killer is going to be sex robots from Japan. Think about it.
[S]hould they bless Microsoft's EOT for use on the web? Or, should they encourage normal font files on the web and help break Microsoft's forgotten monopoly?"
Am I missing something? It seems to me that the very thing Microsoft is proposing - a standard for enforcing font file copy rights - is the thing the linked article suggests is necessary to break Microsoft's "monopoly" on web fonts. After all, high quality fonts are not something that can be cranked out in a couple of nights of coding. Non-MS font labs are probably not inclined to give them away for free if they have no protection from people ripping them off.
The fonts that the supposed "monopoly" centers around don't need this standard.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
I can't believe that today people think DRM actually works. You make it part of some standard, it is cracked 2 days later, then for decades we still have to deal with it.
Why not just assume that it will get cracked, then not implement DRM in the first place?
http://bancomicsans.com/home.html
Should have called it Closed OpenType (COT)
From the article:
I have only once in my life even tried those fonts, back when they were freely available. Truetype support sucked on linux back then, so it was a very short lived exercise. Does anyone here regularly install those fonts on any linux computer they use? I know I haven't.
Just the mere suggestion everyone does is FUD. But this is cnet, after all.
If you design a web site, you want it to show up looking roughly the same on most browsers. For simplicity's sake, most people use the standard fonts (and Mac equivalents).
http://www.ampsoft.net/webdesign-l/WindowsMacFonts.html
If we're going to be embedding fonts, obviously we want as few boring, cumbersome procedures as possible. Forcing us to regenerate pages to approve font use counts as one of these.
Microsoft is barking up the wrong tree on this one.
Anti-Globalism, Traditionalism, and FreeBSD.
Font designers are not going to allow their creations to be installed and used for free on a million PCs.
Who cares...
The question here is whether or not we want the special fonts.
I won't use it anyway.
And BTW, that "monopoly" was greatly aided by the early Linux desktop adopters.
What in the name of Turing's Sainted Mother are you talking about?
Just because a standard exists ^[1mdoesn't^[0m mean it has to be supported.
Hey, Microsoft can keep their DRM scheme, I care about cross browser performance and compatibility, so I want all my sites to look similar or the same, that being said, obviously, I don't see anyone who is a developer wanting to support DRM'ed fonts. Heck DRM is clearly not working with audio/video formats, why the heck should it work with fonts?
the ability to embed fonts is a fantastic feature when it comes to extending your companies brand to your website.
W3C should decline, forcefully. And tell those font designers to deal with the protections on their fonts the same way everyone else deals with protections on their copyright-protected works: when you notice it, sue.
Those who fail to understand communication protocols, are doomed to repeat them over port 80.
Who cares what font designers say. US copyright law says they have no choice in the matter. Font designs are not copyrightable.
Simply put, Firefox now has enough audience that web designers can't ignore it. Either EOT can be implemented with open-source code in firefox, which means its decryption scheme will be right out there in the open (and firefox can even simply fail to implement the DRM portions) - or it will only work in IE, which means it's unlikely to be used anywhere it matters.
The DRM itself isn't the point. The point is the leverage that DRM provides, when combined with dubious things like the DMCA and the BSA. The point is that this gives MS one more club with which to beat people. "Our unannounced raid on your offices shows that you've used our fonts without authorization. Under the provisions of the DMCA, you are now liable for criminal charges ... or we could instead graciously *license* those fonts to you for the mere sum of US$200K, and forget this ever happened."
The DRM itself is not the point. It is merely the means to another end.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
Support this!
Finally, a way to detect when a website is using a crappy font so I can substitute my own regular font.
If studios can protect their fonts, then I won't have to view any more sites where all of the text is embedded in an image, pdf, or rendered in a flash plugin.
I'll be able to copy and paste actual text again. I'll be able to change the font when I can't read it. And the page will only take a couple seconds to load instead of 45 minutes.
Perhaps not, but the data files that store the font are copyrightable and are copyrighted. Which means if you embed those font files in your website (maybe you'd like a nice title like Slashdot in something other than Arial), then you're violating copyright law.
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
The problem with typography on the Internet is the desire of font creators to limit distribution of their work (as the font files themselves are copyrighted in the US, and the font designs elsewhere). Thus, DRM is most likely inevitable in some form or other. This is why PDF obeys the 'no-embedding' bit in TTF, and has the option (if not the requirement) to embed only parts of fonts.
But why stick with a proprietary format? I always wondered what the problem would be with establishing some sort of private/public key signature/encryption method of DRM.
In this way, one would use a signature on the font to ensure that the font can only be used on one domain/rooted-URL and to also 'affix' some sort of source on the file (so that taking the raw font-file won't work elsewhere, and if the decrypted data is redistributed, the source domain/site is plainly visible) and would, furthermore, only be able to be decrypted with a one-time key unique to the session (transferred with SSL?). The end user is ALWAYS going to be able to theoretically pull out the decrypted TTF or rewrite the 'tag' on the decrypted TTF marking its original source, but you're never going to get around that problem in open-source implementations, as black boxes aren't going to be kosher either. At the very least though, you could build on the idea to make it difficult enough for others to crack without trying, and prosecute with the DMCA when they do...
I don't agree with this in the long term, but it's a better solution than a proprietary black box, and is perhaps a reasonable compromise for open-source implementation as well as meeting the rather restrictive demands of the font foundries...
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't I have a pony?
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
If we allow people to use custom fonts, they'll just start using weird fonts for internationalization instead of unicode. They'll lie and claim to be 8859-1, and in the end, we'll just return a web of babel.
Depends what kind of files you use. Linking to a series of .svg files is most likely fine. .ttf files with all the hinting information could be a problem. You can make your own though with some font creation software and the existing font, and there is nothing they can do about it.
I've read the EOT spec. The DRM is trivally, hilariously bad:
In addition, whilst it is possible to embed only those glyphs needed, anyone who's using a CMS is realistically going to be embedding all the glyphs needed for the language anyway.
So why bother?
If your comment title says 'Re: Foo', I'm not likely to read it.
Microsoft might be barking up the wrong tree now, but trees change.
Much the same was said when Flash was in its upsetting little infancy, but it didn't stop clients insisting on 'immersive' experiences and sites that looked like telly. That was annoying, because the web world was suddenly over-run with tiny brainless scribblers who could only understand pictures and didn't know what RGB stood for. But in the end, it all worked out for the best. The more pointlessly obstructive dross you could load on a site's front end, the fewer visitors would get annoyed by the tawdry, transparent, mendacious, fatuous and trite marketing drivel that lurked behind it.
The same will happen with fonts. It'll be awkward and irritating and slow and offensive, but as long as the world gives sustenance to the sort of muppet that says they can do it all in Frutiger, we will just have to suck our teeth, put another line on the estimates and get back to waiting for our lives to finish.
OpenType.
Hey Microsoft, "Open", you keep using that word but I don't think it means what you think it means.
[alk]
EOT also equals End Of Types? (:
Any DRM system for 'public distribution' is destined for failure. Why? Because, ultimately, you have to give the end-user some way to decrypt the raw font/music/video/whatever. If the user can decrypt it, there is NOTHING that can technically stop them from extracting the unencrypted data (as long as someone, somewhere, can write an app which pretends to be the 'legitimate app', but in reality does something the 'legitimate app' does not, like offering to save the font data to a file for you).
Encryption works to protect data between 1 part and 1 other party, where those two parties agree to not share the data with anyone else. Trying to use encryption to protect 'mass-market' distribution is a logical impossibility. Either I can or cannot decrypt the data, and if I can, I've got it, and can potentially give it to others.
All right: load the font (not a violation of copyright, as per USC 17.101). Examine its outlines and re-encode them separately. For bonus points, use a different outline format (say, Type 1).
You'll end up with a file that shares none of its bytes with the original file, but that still describes the same font. (Sans hinting, but who needs that these days?) I don't think the new "font program" would qualify as a derivative work because the only commonality between it and the old file is the geometry of the font itself, which cannot be copyrighted.
If you want precise fonts, use PDF.
As far as I know, PDF has supported embedded fonts from the start. There are some people who obsess over fonts embedded in their PDF documents and using exactly the right font, and what's the impact?
Most people don't even notice.
Trying to turn HTML into PDF has never worked well.
If it doesn't even make a difference for PDF, why should we care?
W3C shouldn't do it, but not merely because DRM is harmful to everyone. There's a deeper reason. They shouldn't do, because it doesn't make sense.
The whole point of standards is to have a spec that anyone can implement, such that differing implementations of different parts, will interoperate.
The whole point of DRM is to PREVENT interoperable implementations!
It's not just dumb to put DRM in a standard; it's a contradiction to put DRM in a standard. If the DRM works, then it's not a standard, and if it's a standard, then the DRM doesn't work.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
If this helps get rid of the complete abomination that is SIFR, I'm all for it.
You've got to appreciate the fact that it actually works, but it is such a giant hack...
And is sucks worse for type fonts.
Microsoft is trying, once again, to monopolize the web. Someone should consider filing a class-action suit in federal trade court.
Again.
You will get my fonts when you pry them out of my cold, dead keyboard!
Thus, we don't even need to get to the copy protection issue -- the mere idea of binding fonts to an HTML page at all is utterly laughable on its face. It belies a fundamental misunderstanding of what HTML is and the set of problems it's intended to address.
If image is more important to you than content, then go play with PDF -- that's what it's for -- and leave HTML alone.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
I always wondered what the problem would be with establishing some sort of private/public key signature/encryption method of DRM.
Yes, open source DRM! Nobody would ever take advantage of the fact that if you're using DRM you're giving the recipient the encrypted data, the algorithm to decrypt it, and the key, to write a little tool that just strips the DRM off and web content you point it at! Even those commie open source people are that heartless!
An anomalous decision based on a doctrine of utility and an ancient case fearing the locking-up of communication. The concern is rooted in the pre-digital age when typefaces were far more limited in number. Subsequent case law has been treading deeper into protection of the creative aspects of typeface design, particularly in light of counterexamples in Europe--copyright protection there has increased the competitive marketplace for typefaces and has resulted in no such "lockdown" on information, as the preexisting set of typefaces remains free and open to use, and all works produced on validly licensed fonts are free to use. Further, any infringement is incumbent on the producer, and avoidance is simply the use of one of the public domain, free, or purchased fonts the producer has lawful use of.
Not all typefaces would be copyrightable under the Merger Doctrine anyway, even ignoring the hundreds of typefaces ineligible for protection from the outset. Commercial typefaces can be improved through copyright protection, giving US artists an ability to compete on the international stage.
This of course, brings us to the greater point: the United States is obliged to honor the European copyrights on typefaces as a signatory to the Berne Convention. Thus, many fonts are afforded copyright protection. It's simply that due to a quirk in our Copyright Act (which we are technically obliged to change to harmonize with Europe due to international IP agreements) and an old SCOTUS decision, the typeface itself is not copyrightable here. Other means of economic protection are, however, available independent of copyright, and are used for some of the high-end typefaces and packages.
Copyright on typefaces would actually stir competition and make more fonts available freely (as in money), while continuing to permit the design and copyright-free release of typefaces to those who wish to do so. It would also eliminate a US-only oddity.
The concern about copyright on typefaces is intuitively appealing, but in practice is not a true concern. In fact, the scope of protection is so narrow that any form of independent creation without direct reproduction counts as a new typeface, so there can never be an impenetrable thicket.
Chose a Ralph Lauren color chip. Went to Home Depot to have it mixed in their brand of paint. They refused. Said the color was copyrighted. Asked a different staff member on a different day - same response. This is in Canada, where despite stronger copyright law in many areas this kind of silliness seems to be rarer.
IANAL, but I don't believe the law supports the copyright of a color (a collection of colors might be a different matter). That's in theory. Practice, unless you have buckets of cash for lawyers, is another matter.
If you design a web site, you want it to show up looking roughly the same on most browsers. For simplicity's sake, most people use the standard fonts (and Mac equivalents).
That's deeply foolish, you know. Users can (and do) set their own style sheets, and they are even more likely to change the size of the fonts in use. Expecting a page to look exactly as someone designed it to be is silly; "web designers" need to get used to the fact (and I've been going on about this on and off since before such a job description existed).
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
.
There are thousands of "free" fonts to be found on the web.
But the truth of it is that type design and typography on the professional level is as a ratified a skill as you will find anywhere:
Times New Roman dates from 1931. Baskerville from 1757. Bruce Rogers and His Centaur
Expecting the first-tier foundries like Monotype to make a free gift of their most artful and significant designs is simply not realistic.
Copyright on fonts makes a lot of sense
In an ideal world I'd agree. However the way things seem to be going I'd be dead against it because some corporate lawyer would find away to make me pay to use my own handwriting.
The lack of diversity in font use is a symptom, not proof that this is unnecessary. Designers and webmasters have become used to limited choices, just like governments and corporations have gotten used to Helvetica, or people have gotten used to *ahem* the intolerability of Windows. Embedded fonts would let this problem be escaped, which publishers in the printed world have been doing for a few years now. (Yes, the notion of having to regenerate a font is ugly, as is DRM, but having more fonts is very compatible with making each site have its own unique identity. And that identity probably isn't going to be Wingdings 2.)
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
Do you want your stuff indexed by search engines? Use a goddamn standard encoding then. If you think you can do without search engines, I think I can do without you.
It will depend on how "slimy" the campaign for EOT is. If something is slimy enough, /. actually thinks it's cool.
/. will never get tired of watching "Ghostbusters".
Knowledge is the small part of ignorance that we arrange and classify. (Ambrose Bierce)
The one time I've used Eot has worked perfectly for everyone: They were normal users (not linux) and the pages displayed perfectly, with lovely TTF encoded fonts.
Ooops- what should we do about those who couldn't see the pages?
If W3C doesn't respond to this with a good nice "fuck off"... Well, I don't really think there's another possible scenario in this case, really. W3C agreeing with DRM, which is against just about everything they have been advocating regarding how the web should work is just non-sense... I think MS was probably intending to send this to ECMA or some other dummy standards body.
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
See the Wikipedia article and the W3C team comment on the submission
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embedded_OpenType
http://www.w3.org/Submission/2008/01/Comment
MS has found yet another absolutelly useless way of amusing itself. I mean who, besides MS's braindead marketing & innovation departments, need that crap? I don't, I like my web with a standard easily-readable font. MS should do us all a favour and limit their ideas to themselves.
Given the choise between Hitler and RIAA/MPAA I'd go for the first one - at least he knew when to shoot himself.
Why isn't this an issue with rights-encumbered photos and images on the web?
You can buy photos today. Some are licensed for a Web audience, some are not. There are technologies to find illegal use of photos out there, and more coming.
Fonts can be same way - either licensed for a Web audience, or not. It should be trivial to detect those that abuse such licensing, much more so than images.
So - what is so special about fonts that they require the DRM treatment? Let the free market sort it out. If paying for Web license is too much, people will just use "standard" fonts, or they'll resort to using flash or other silliness.
a relevant link
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
The thing is that font designs aren't actually copyrightable in the US
Really? So if I make a program that takes an Adobe font, renders it into very high resolution raster, do edge detection on that, and write back my own TTF file, I can freely redistribute them? No design patents or anything?
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Just not every time someone wants to see their work.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
...when Microsoft bought its way to approval of what it wanted? Microsoft has lots of cash. Why should the W3C be any different?
This is because you are confusing cause and effect. You call it Simplicity, I call it lowest common denominator. Most people use the standard fonts because the have to, not because they want to. I work at an organization with a corporate branding strategy that uses a font that isn't one of the "standards." This automatically makes all the web sites I build non-compliant with the branding strategy unless I can somehow embed that font in the web page or render parts of the site as graphics.
This is a boring sig
Because the resolution of the rendering screen or even how well its colours can be addressed can make a font that looks *great* look like shit.
Part of the reason of MS's fonts being created was because the standard fonts looked great with their kerning and uprights and drops on PRINT PAPER but when you put them on a 75dpi screen you got crap because there's no room for the font to represent itself without interference from the next character.
So what happens when you have a nice font for your 125dpi screen but I view it on my smartphone at 60dpi? Or I print it off on a laser printer at 1600dpi?
And you cannot demand I only view your webpage on a hi-res LCD monitor.
It has apparently escaped your notice, but the US is very busy trying to propagate its particular legal interpretation of "intellectual property" throughout the rest of the world, under the auspices of the World Trade Organization and the World Intellectual Property Organization, among other avenues. The DMCA itself might be specific to the US, but similar laws have been passed or at least proposed across much of the rest of the globe.
The DMCA! Coming Soon to a Country Near You!!! TM (c) (r) (pat. pend.) ...
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
Gotta like articles that use the word 'slimy' in the first line. Pretty much ensures fair and reasonable content
OK this specification says that certain values are "unsigned long"s or "unsigned short"s. Is this meant to be a reference to the C specification? Doesn't the C spec only define a minimum size? Is an unsigned long 32 or 64 bits? Where does the spec specify this?
It also makes reference to an "EMBEDDEDFONT structure" yet fails to define how this "structure" is arranged in memory.
Forget the DRM the spec is ambigous and baddly written!
uh, it's a proven fact that serif fonts are easier to read but harder to scan.
At 600 dpi, I'll believe that.
Even at 300 dpi, most serif typefaces suffer from rendering problems.
At 72 dpi, most serif fonts simply can not be rendered even vaguely accurately at reasonable point sizes. If they'd picked something like Clarendon it would be a different matter, but Times Roman? That's where "conventional wisdom" turns into "conventional foolishness".
Don't use the same name, they're usually Trademarked.
And if you copied 100% of the size hinting, they would claim you were copying the program portion.
But, in essence, yes.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
Note who their constituency is. Not Web designers. Not users. Not browser makers. Not the health of the Web, etc. This page is to lobby Font Shops to modify their EULA's to allow EOT. Most high-end font shops don't allow embedding at all unless it's in an image. Check out HF&J's ridiculous policy.
From one of the ref'd articles:
Fonts are intellectual property and therefore, the argument goes, cannot be published on the web.
That sounds completely absurd - no IP gets published on the web? Makes me suspect of the author and article.
Anyway, it seems the point of the article is that to get this fancy fontness (great, even more "sizzle" on the Web) you're presently going to have to get down with some MSFT DRM. Unless you've slept through the last two or three decades, you should know better than to even consider the Microsoft option.
Wait/lobby for another solution if this is a real problem.
Aren't open source fonts the correct answer to this problem anyway? Nothing against the font makers, but it seems their product (or maybe just business model) just isn't very compatible with the Internet.*
-Matt
* Or maybe this is only a "problem" for designers and should be suitably ignored as it has been thus far. Already too many resources being poured into design with not enough focusing on quality of content. Enough sizzle already!
here's still the obvious moral issue of DRM, but the proponents of the idea are much more serious than that.
Did you mean to say: "the proponents of the idea aren't serious enough to consider that."
I mean the argument is that "images are too hard" or "not good enough", etc. That may be serious, but only to a "designer". In fact the alternatives are working out just fine in daily use.
If they (the "designers") were really serious, they'd be making noise about banning Flash from similar uses. Isn't the web shiny enough already? ("Yes" in case you even hesitated.)
-Matt
While I am against Microsoft's vision of DRM-laden fonts (the internet is open and free dammit) I welcome the future of font embedding. It would be a huge boon towards a semantic, searchable and accessible web. Designers would have no reason to insert images (or Flash) in place of text order to get the desired typographic effect.
Before you say "HTML is semantic, there is no place for presentation it the spec!" read the actual proposal, it's for the CSS spec, not HTML - right where presentation belongs. Quite frankly, it's silly that this isn't already in place given the rate that we continue to move away from print.
Let's get one thing strait. You are going to download your fucking font onto my computer then tell me I can only use it in one program/page. How about you take that font and stick it in a hole of your choice.
There are two issues here, that slashdot combines, and neither of them are DRM. First, characters not used on the page may be dropped from the font to save space - this isn't DRM, just a bandwidth saving measure. This is why the EOT fonts, if subsetted, must be regenerated if your site changed - while it may be annoying, depending on the implementation, there are no restrictions on the renderer, nor is this a required portion of the spec.
Second, there are embedding flags (EOT spec, 4.1). These are essentially a machine-readable copyright and license statement - it is absolutely trivial to manipulate this field. You could do it in a few dozen lines of code in the programming language of your choice, with no need to reverse engineer, drag out keys, whatever.
In short, nothing to see here. This slashdot article makes a big deal out of absolutely nothing.
But Scalable Vector Graphics already do that, sans the shitty and unnecessary DRM.
/shapes/? Did they also propose a standard for blocking screen captures? Or vision? How ridiculous some peoples fantasies about data protection are.
And who's the market here? Doesn't anyone else think it's weird to try to protect
Quack, quack.
Or do what PostScript and PDF did for a long time: Subset the font to only include the characters actually used, which is usually good enough to prevent the reuse of the font in a different context.
Maybe this is just Microsoft fooling the foundries into giving away their fonts. W3C will never approve this unless open source browsers can use the fonts and we all know how strong open source DRM can be (deEOT should come out faster than deCSS). The only cloud is the scope to use `subsetting' of fonts, i.e., a page's EOT font only includes the characters used on that page. Subsetting is common for fonts embedded in PDF. Looks like there's a bitmap-only option too for EOT.
Much as I love to suspect Microsoft, I can't see this as a big win for them unless they find a way to leverage EOT as Windows-only.
You mean because the W3C was too stupid or lazy to provide a solution without the ridiculous layer of DRM?
I mean, I get that designers shouldn't be limited to an arbitrary set of 'approved' fonts. But what's the point of adding the proprietary layer on top of the TrueType/Opentype container? Why bring complexity when it clearly can't protect anything?
Quack, quack.
Imagine a custom font that displays an 'a' as an 'n', a 'b' as an 'o' etc... (rot13). Then, generate a human-readable page that will still look like total gibberish to search engines. While it may seem silly to do this for whole pages, it could be quite useful for small fragments of a page that should not be (easily) understood by spiders. Encoding email addresses in a spam harvester-resistant way comes to mind as one possible application. Or the same with names of audio and video files...
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
...what... it can...
If this political bs gets through w3c it's time to fork the web.
With tools available to grep captcha's and break them within the minute this should be no-brainer to ocr those addresses in an alternative way..
I'd say get a webform for this and get first contact through that form; that way you'll not be exposing your e-mail to the world wait web.
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
You've made more a case for SVG then against. But I don't see why fonts can't be embedded and called within websites without trying to force broken (in practice and in spirit) DRM layers over everything.
Quack, quack.
ISO, W3C, who is next?, yeah... I can see them going with the IEEE to propose another unnecesary standard.
How many people here besides myself read a W3C mailing list? The first thing I thought when I saw the article is "hmm, that would go against all the emails I've seen." On the W3C CSS mailing list, the number of people in support of EOT is small, tiny. To quote one person:
If EOT is the answer, why isn't Silverlight using it?
Support on the mailing lists is rather scant.
No. Do a Google search for "School of Design." Look at their websites and portfolios. See how many of them use only the web-safe fonts in their work. (Hint: zero.)
No, you shouldn't use a handwritten script font for paragraph content, even if you could. But the idea that nothing on a page (including headlines) should be anything but the standard web fonts is ludicrous. Currently, headlines are often images to get around that limitation.
More font options would mean the headlines would still look nice, they could be more accessible and scalable, and that you could still look at everything in Arial if you wanted to.
The web is about "give people freedom and let the best browsers/sites/designs emerge," not "limit people to X choices because I know what's best."
The discussion here sucks. It's driven by design-luddite trolls setting up straw man arguments about why we're better off without font embeddability. Then it's followed up by the standard anti-DRM rhetoric.
Meanwhile nobody is talking about font piracy, which is actually a much huger problem than software, music or movie piracy. Because of the size of the market, size of the files, and the amount of work that goes into creating quality fonts, piracy can have a real detrimental effect on the industry, directly leading to a drastic reduction in new font production.
At /. everyone sees DRM through the lens of some of the terribly crippled and illegal schemes that have come in the past, and the RIAA's hostility towards its customers, running roughshod over fair-use, and disregard for quality in their own products.
But the font industry is another story. One that shows the effects of casual piracy to be very damaging. The idea of some lightweight DRM to prevent casual piracy at least merits consideration (not of the brittle phone-home variety). If copying fonts becomes a simple matter of save as... in any browser, we could enter a world where the font design industry shrivels up and can only come back with a more heavy-handed DRM format just to survive.
in any browser, we could enter a world where the font design industry shrivels up and can only come back with a more heavy-handed DRM format just to survive.
..and as we've learned from iTunes, that will assuredly save the font industry...
"'Yrch!' said Legolas, falling into his own tongue."
You only need 3 fonts.
But which 3?
Georgia (ugh)
Verdana (passable)
Courier (yugh)
If that's the choice, no thanks. Each website/book/whatever only needs 3 fonts, but each person would choose a different 3; that's why we have so many.