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?"

Comments

DRM on FONTS?!

[Ethanol-fueled]

What...the...fuck?

Next they'll have DRM on colors.

Re:DRM on FONTS?!

[TJamieson]

To be honest, the DRM on fonts is a bit overblown. To create an EOT, you must supply the *beginning* part of the URL to which the font is bound. This is, unfortunately, done with DNS.

That said, if you created "MyDomain1.com", "MyDomainCool.com", "MyDomainIsBest.com", etc., you would need only to generate an EOT bound to "http://mydomain" and it works on all those domains I listed.

Now, though I've said these things, I will also say that EOT is terrible, having worked with it off and on for several years. I'm *dying* for true web fonts in CSS to finally take hold.

One thing many people posting here forget is all the foreign character sets that are not necessarily represented with fonts on an end-user's system. Good luck displaying all of Pashto on an English Win2k machine without (1) fonts installed directly on the machine or (2) web fonts.

Re:Loaded question

[Gyga]

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.

Re:Yay!

[Thelasko]

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.

This isn't a problem anymore

[42forty-two42]

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.

Srsly?

[bill_mcgonigle]

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?