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

[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

[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

[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:DRM on FONTS?!

[argent]

Pantone would love that!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.