Slashdot Mirror
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?"
What...the...fuck?
Next they'll have DRM on colors.
Indeed - support for @font-face is already here in Safari and is being considered for Firefox.
font-face (not this MS EOT font stuff) is a real boon for web typography - I just wish the W3C had asked some designers/typographers their opinions earlier in the standards process, as currently type on the web is really poor. As for EOT - they tried that years ago, and it didn't take off because of.... DRM. I don't see what they think will be different this time round.
Here's hoping other browser manufacturers simply ignore Microsoft.
What if I want a fancy title without using an image that screws over scalability (fluid layouts FTW) and screen reading software? Sane font usage could be good for design purposes.
Of course we need options/extensions to over ride fonts when the Myspace-Unreadability-Guild (TM) figures out that black on black in weird grunge font looks good.
I don't preview or spellcheck.
If you thought Vista was slow now, wait until it has to check with a DRM server to display ANYTHING!
I worked in IT for a summer when I was in college. The company's art department always needed much more powerful computers than the others. As I was setting the machines up, I discovered why they needed such fancy hardware. It was all the damn fonts! Those things made the machines so slow, it was ridiculous.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
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?
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.
Untrue. BD+ hasn't been cracked, but it hasn't really been used yet. Most BDs still use the same DRM HD-DVD used. (I forget what it's called.)
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=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Unfortunately, too many people think that the whole concept of "the HTML dictates the content, and the browser dictates the look" from the far past is somehow carved in stone tablets given by God. It's not. The point of a browser is to communicate with a web site, and there are a lot of different ways to do that.
Right, the point of the web is communication. Anything that hinders communication is antithetical.
I'm all for lovely design, don't get me wrong, but PDF is a better language to describe layout than HTML and CSS.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
and the half-implemented scheme Apple designed for Leopard.
Hey, Apple's been half-implementing that stuff for two decades! :)
OSX, nee OpenStep (nee NeXTStep), has been using resolution-independent display (DPS, DPDF) forever. Their GUI elements just don't support it yet. Word is they'll be getting off their butts to fix this for Snow Leopard. We'll see.
Expecting everyone to use PDFs for their eighty-bazillion DPI laz0r-displays or live with 72-DPI images standing in for what should be high-res vectors is not good enough.
I'm not following - why are inline PDF's or SVG's insufficient? Because IE doesn't have native SVG support?
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I think a well-designed web page should have the ability to have any common html elements pointed to a different CSS definition, and still render reasonably. That's a feature; if changing a font breaks your page, you are designing web pages that are like a BASIC program full of GOTOs.
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.
I mean it's not like Microsofts DRM pixie-dust can actually stop the fonts from being displayed. Once it's one your screen how many clicks before you can have it vectorized? Opps.
I think you'd loose hinting. I guess that's ok if you want to use the same point size as the webpage or don't care about it scaling correctly.