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?"
"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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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
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'!"
It's not exactly revolutionary to say that most people don't care about art or design. But fonts can do a lot of things nonetheless: they might contain drop-caps that don't turn into a nasty pixelated mess when printed, or they might contain other ornaments, or an alien script for a sci-fi novel. The main advantage here is that they're in a vector format with a lower overhead than SVG.
On top of that, this can sort of be correlated to the holocaust of the GNOME stupidity debate. Why should the people who do want nice features and customization be forced to suffer because the majority simply doesn't care or won't notice? Body fonts can do a great many things with apparently subtle changes, from making a page look very antiquated to expressing emotions. Maybe not everyone notices it, but it still provides an important element of the experience tot hose who do.
Also, this could mean fewer flash banners made in the name of interesting fonts. (I can't think of any, but I'm sure it's been done.)
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
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.)
But fonts can do a lot of things nonetheless: they might contain drop-caps that don't turn into a nasty pixelated mess when printed,
like this?
Why should the people who do want nice features and customization be forced to suffer because the majority simply doesn't care or won't notice?
Are you talking about PDF, or HTML?
If you want to deliver a print-quality document, use a format that's designed for print-quality output, like a Postscript derivative like PDF, not one that's designed for readability on a huge variety of display devices at the cost of accurate rendering.
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)
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
I always found truetype fonts sucked period, and the adobe type1 fonts seemed to render better, especially when printed.
From a technical viewpoint, today, there is very little to distinguish the formats. TrueType only does quadratic Bezier curves where Type 1 does cubic, but it is trivial to interpolate cubic curves with quadratic ones, at a slight cost in code size.
When you buy fonts, the higher-quality fonts tend to be in the Type 1 format, but that is for historical reasons.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
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
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)
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...
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.
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.