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

Loaded question

[celardore]

"Or, should they encourage normal font files on the web and help break Microsoft's forgotten monopoly?"

Gee, I wonder what /. will think...

Re:Loaded question

[AltGrendel]

60% will think "That depends on how much money Microsoft throws at the W3C.
35% will think "So what, I won't use it anyway."
4% will think "Microsoft should do whatever it pleases, nothing has stopped it from doing that anyway."

The remaining 1% will be various trolls and flamebait.

Re:Loaded question

[argent]

5% will think "That depends on how much money Microsoft spends to pack voting bodies with sock puppets."
10% will think "So what, I won't use it anyway."
50% will think "Microsoft will do whatever it wants anyway."
90% will be various trolls and flamebait.

Disclaimer: totals do not add to 100% because some contestants qualify for more than one category. Contents may have settled in shipping. 186,000 miles a second.... it's not just a good idea, it's the law. No animals were harmed in testing this product. Fnord.

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:Loaded question

[X0563511]

I don't want your fancy font! If my browser wants to use foo-font regular, point 10, I want it to be able to.

If you are more worried over presentation, HTML may not be the media for you.

Re:Loaded question

[Gyga]

So over ride it (within a week of any sort of font whatever being implemented in Firefox there will be an extension), designers still should be able to design something. Heck this way you would get text that can be adjusted by your browser instead of an image.

Re:Loaded question

[mysqlrocks]

While I agree with you in theory, I don't think you're considering the practicality here. Many web designers come from the print world where they _do_ have total control over presentation. Yes, they need to learn about separating structure and presentation. But, we should do everything we can to encourage them to design "correctly." I think the GPs point was that letting designer's pick a specific font is better than them deciding to use an image instead of text - he was offering up a compromise. Now, whether or not I agree is a whole other question ;-)

Re:Loaded question

[Firehed]

And web design may not be for you. Set your damn user style sheet and it'll override whatever attractive layout the designer provided for you with whatever ugly font you want.

I'm not a designer, but let's stop pretending it's 1995.

Re:Loaded question

[Reality Master 101]

Use font-family, do NOT specify a font for me. I, or my browser, will choose the font.

My page, my design. But feel free to use a browser that does anything you want to the pages you want to display. But the vast majority of the rest of the world likes visiting well-designed pages.

Re:Loaded question

[Reality Master 101]

A well designed page has no care for the specific font that is used, only the style of font and size.

No, that's a particular *design option* that may or may not be important to the design specification. In certain other cases, it's important to exercise tight control of the maximum width of some text, and that requires specifying the font. For example, I might have a news site with a headline box, and I want each headline to fit on one line without line-breaking and making it look crappy (with a bunch of lines with a single word on each second line). Now, if someone chooses to change the fonts, then it degenerates the way it degenerates. But for most of the world, it will look like a clean, polished design.

And no, not every page needs to be auto-sizing to the width of the browser... that's also a design option that may or may not be appropriate for every design.

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.

Re:Loaded question

[Selanit]

You don't need to be a print designer to want more fonts. The list of "safe" fonts that can be expected to work reliably in most web browsers includes:

Arial
Arial Black
Comic Sans MS
Courier New
Georgia
Impact
Times New Roman
Trebuchet MS
Verdana

That's it. NINE fonts for BILLIONS of web sites.

I'm not a print designer. But I make lots of web pages, and damn it, nine fonts is not enough. Typography is the single most powerful and versatile design tool in existence. You can use it to convey emotion, to highlight important bits of a page, to subtly improve reading comprehensibility, and on and on.

Not to mention the specialty uses. Have you ever tried to transliterate Egyptian hieroglyphs on the web? I have, and I had to go the sIFR route to represent characters which are just not available, such as the character shaped like a 3 representing a palatal A sound.

And then there's stuff like medieval transcriptions. How can I post a good transcription of a Middle English romance without the characters thorn, eth, yogh, and wynn? Some of those are available in standard fonts, especially thorn and eth, but yogh and wynn are a lot harder to come by. You can get them using Junicode, but only if your visitor happens to have that particular font installed, which 99.99999% of people do not. sIFR isn't really a solution in that case, because you only need four damn characters, repeated at intervals throughout a fairly lengthy text.

But hey, 640K should be enough for anyone!

Re:Loaded question

[Blakey Rat]

I think the majority of responses will be:

"Why do I need all these flashy fonts on the web anyway! I have my browser show every website in Courier 10, and daggummit, that's the way every site should be! Back when I was a kid we didn't have none of these fancy fonts and we were all happier. Websites with Flash on them are basically Satan!!! GET OFF MY LAWN!"

Re:Loaded question

[riceboy50]

If you are worried over semantics, HTML may not be the media for you.
If you are worried over accessibility, HTML may not be the media for you.

Where did you come up with this? The main focus of web standards in the last 5+ years has been making the markup more semantic and more accessible—hell, that's one of the main purposes of CSS. Now please leave the web design profession.

Re:Loaded question

[Hatta]

You only need 3 fonts. A serif, a san-serif, and a fixed width. For English at least.

Re:Loaded question

[Selanit]

Designers with formal design background know that that list is all you really need.

SARCASM
Ah! That explains why word processing software like MS Word, OpenOffice.org and AbiWord only offer those same nine fonts, and there is no more advanced print design software. The next time I see Quark XPress or Adobe InDesign running, I'll be sure to treat them as the hallucinations they are. Thanks for clearing up those mysteries. END SARCASM

I direct your attention to the following:

1) The Principles of Beautiful Web Design, by Jason Beaird. He has formal graphic design training, wrote a book on the topic, and does not appreciate having his options limited to nine fonts.
2) The Non-Designer's Design Book and The Non-Designer's Typography Book, both by Robin Williams. She's not only a trained graphic designer who has written several books on the topic, but one who works primarily in print. She loves her typography, and really hates the limited nature of fonts on the web (see The Non-Designer's Web Design Book for that).

I wouldn't WANT anything else used as the primary font. Imagine having to read paragraphs of crap using FancySwirlyCrap.ttf, because some designer thought it was cool. Ugh, no f'ing thanks.

Sure. People will make crappy web pages with crappy designs that hurt your eyes. Guess what? They already do. I'd tell you to go browse MySpace for a couple hours, but I'm not that cruel.

Meanwhile, the good designers who know what they're doing are crippled.

Use the standard fonts, that's why that list is exactly what it is.

The list is that way because of Microsoft's Core Fonts for the Web program, initiated in 1996. The basic aim of the program was to give web designers some kind of consistent control over the typography in their sites -- prior to that time, you just had to pick a font and take your chances.

Readability was one consideration in the list of fonts they settled on, sure. But the basic aim was to improve designer's control over the default fonts. It achieved that goal well. And now it's time to move on.

Happily, it looks to me as though this is going to happen, regardless of whether everyone likes it or not. I'm sure they'll give you a configuration setting to turn off web fonts, though, so you can go on reading Times New Roman and Arial until the end of your days if you'd like.

Yay!

[omeomi]

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.

Re:Yay!

[argent]

I haven't been so excited since JWZ came up with BLINK.

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.

Re:Yay!

[jonbryce]

The thing is that font designs aren't actually copyrightable in the US. Microsoft etc get round that by copyrighting the "font software", ie they argue that the .ttf file is actually a computer program that displays the font, and that computer program as distinct from the font design it dispays is copyrightable.

DRM on FONTS?!

[Ethanol-fueled]

What...the...fuck?

Next they'll have DRM on colors.

Re:DRM on FONTS?!

[argent]

Pantone would love that!

Re:DRM on FONTS?!

[Samantha Wright]

This may come as a shock, but professionally-designed fonts can actually take a year or two to perfect. In terms of effort involved in creating them, DRM on music is probably more absurd.

Re:DRM on FONTS?!

[Ed Avis]

Copyright on fonts makes a lot of sense, just as for music, novels, films and a lot of other stuff.

DRM, on the other hand, sounds like a thoroughly nasty idea; in jurisdictions with crazy laws like the DMCA, it could even make free software web browsers (that come with source code so you can modify them) illegal, just as free programs to play DVDs have been made illegal.

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:Doesn't matter

[Westech]

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?

How about the fact that being standards compliant is one of the main advantages that Mozilla, Safari, and other browsers currently have over IE? IE ignoring W3C standards has significantly weakened the usefulness of the standards. If other browsers are forced to also begin ignoring the standards due to BS like this being adopted then the existence of the standards will become pointless.

Your browser doesn't support ANSI X3.64!

[argent]

Just because a standard exists ^[1mdoesn't^[0m mean it has to be supported.

Bogus

[Relic of the Future]

Bogus argument. You could make the same claims for images; but the lack of drm in .jpg, .gif, and .png didn't stop anyone from putting images online. Hell, TEXT enjoys copyright protection, and there's all kinds of that, plain as day for anyone to "steal", embeded in every .html file!

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.

Point isn't DRM, but the leverage provided

[zooblethorpe]

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,

DRM doesn't make sense for any standard

[Sloppy]

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.

Brimming Over with Wrongability

[ewhac]

HTML is a semantic markup language, not a presentation markup language. Stylesheets allow presentation specification, but the stylesheets were separated from HTML expressly to attempt to preserve HTML's semantic nature.

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

Re:Linux users install MS fonts???

[amorsen]

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.

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?

Beware of trademarks

[PRMan]

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.