Slashdot Mirror
Typography On the Web Gets Different
bstender writes "Most major browsers — including the latest versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, and Opera — recognize a CSS rule known as @font-face. What that means, in brief, is that Web developers can now easily embed downloadable fonts in their pages. To see an example, load up Firefox 3.5 or Safari 4 and learn more. You'll see three new typefaces — Liza, Auto, and Dolly — used in the body text and headlines."
No doubt the licensing issues are just as complex as the font nerd potential.
That page looked terrible on my PC (with FireFox 3.5)! I can easily see this getting abused.
The dogcow says "Moof!"
I've been waiting for something like this for a while. When I first got into web stuff I was struck by the vast difference between web layout and print layout. Yes, I understand the point about pixel-perfect control being a shackle and how web is supposed to have the flexibility of displaying on different hardware, different browsers, anything from a PDA to a 24" graphic designer screen. I've been bitten by websites that were so strickly formatted that they were unusable outside of their expected use. That being said, I still wanted embeddable fonts. Nice to see we have them now.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
I was under the impression that no version of IE supported @font-face?
http://arstechnica.com/web/news/2009/07/font-face-typekit-and-font-licensing-the-state-of-web-type.ars
Now instead of quickly rendered and clearly legible standard fonts, web pages will be burdened with additional downloads, rendering changes, and shitty shitty script and graffiti fonts. I'd like to turn this functionality off, please, and prevent my browser from wasting bandwidth on downloading these fonts... Haven't there also been font-based exploits? No thanks!
Now, I don't know much about CSS. I'm more the "local" person in our security team (as compared to the "remote" gurus sitting some good distance from me. Yes, go ahead, make your jokes). But ... something that downloads something from the internet and pushes it through a browser without asking anyone human first looks a wee bit problematic for me.
Could anyone gimme a hint before I get off my rear and haul the same over those maybe even 30 feet to our remote gurus, so I won't look stupid when I suggest that problem to them?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
... how long before some hack turns this into an exploit for new self-installing viruses?
Licensing? Nightmare.
Bandwidth? Eek.
Security? Whoa!
Compatibility? Doesn't downgrade nicely (that page looks horrible in a "stable" browser of today and is almost unreadable)
Gains? Geocities-like webpages that use every font they can just for the sake of it. Seven million websites written in Comic Sans. And only the sensible browsers will come with options to turn the damn thing off (and thus look even worse).
Stupid idea, stupid execution (having to DOWNLOAD every font mentioned on a page?)
"Comic Sans" would be nice, just for a change...
/ducks
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
... and web browsers can easily be set to ignore.
The average "Web developer" knows nothing about type, and thinks "kearning" is something you do to corn on the cob. Read a whole essay in Trainwreck Bold Oblique? No thanks.
kulakovich
Yep.
We had to switch from Linotype's Zapfino Extra to Adobe's Caflisch Script in a custom story book project 'cause Linotype wanted _thousands_ of dollars per _year_ to license the (already purchased) font for on-line PDF Previewing usage.
There are of course opensource / creative commons fonts, those can be used, but if everyone is using them, that kind of defeats the whole point of changing the typeface. Also, I haven't seen an opensource typeface that has the kind of hinting effort Georgia, Times New Roman, Arial &c. have (TNR in particular has man _years_ worth of effort in it) --- unfortunately we haven't gotten to the screen density which would allow us to dispense w/ hinting.
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
What licensing issues?
That some people want to be paid for their work is not an issue. That people can use unlicensed fonts isn't really any different than today (I suppose font designers might be a bit less happy with a solution that is promiscuous with their precious data).
An easy workaround would be for someone like the Mozilla foundation to spend a few million dollars making sure that a decent variety of fonts were available under liberal licenses. They may not feel like it, but they could certainly afford it, and if a few million dollars isn't enough to generate a couple of dozen decent fonts, I would be pretty surprised. Amusingly, Microsoft felt the need to do something like this a decade ago, and they actually did it.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
I can easily see this getting abused.
Your prediction need only look back on UI technologies like Flash to realize that there will certainly be some of an "artistic" nature that will be enabled by this new technology to make their page look like this. Don't get me wrong, I love !!! and their music. And I find the site amusing. Horrendously confusing (you'll notice you can interact with those things) but a common occurrence among bands to take Flash to a level it's not supposed to go.
.swf file. At least the browser will be able to show you something if you don't have the ability/desire to render it.
And I welcome it. Seriously, I'd rather have this be a well formed completely open standard in CSS and allow the creative types a way to vent and put tattoo or gothic or whatever font all over their page. At least I won't need a plugin. At least it won't be in some weird
I'm not going to start using this until everything's ironed out and your average web surfer finds it not only acceptable but desirable. But I still am excited that CSS and HTML are meeting needs. With IE6 soon dead, they are liberated.
People will abuse the tools you give them. If you don't believe me, go visit the graveyard that is Geocities. Doesn't stop the rest of us from using the tools in the way they were meant to be used. You might have an argument about this exacerbating the issue with these latest tools but I've always been one to promote unbridled liberation on the web.
My work here is dung.
Once again, the form versus function debate ...
Apparently, there are some out there who feel that words alone are not enough; they need a particular font to convey emotion or a particular feel.
I just hope that any browser that supports this makes it optional, and I can turn off the downloading altogether.
Maybe I'm just paranoid, but it sounds like it's a great candidate for some security exploits.
In about:config, set gfx.downloadable_fonts.enabled to false and restart the browser.
Fight hunger. Filet a politician and send him to a 3rd world country of your choice.
Yes, we do need more fonts, but we need semantic ones. This is the entirely wrong way to go about it.
As anyone who's looked at their (good) browser's settings knows, the web supports standard "semantic" or functional font specifications, like sans, sans-serif, and cursive. You can assign these to things like Arial, Times, and Isabella or whatever cursive font you want.
The web page in the example really has no place specifying the exact font which should be used, as people with visual impairments, people with low-res portable devices, or people whose native language isn't based on a latin script, might have extreme difficulty reading it. However, if you specify that the title is to be in a cursive font, then browsers could simply ship with nice cursive font settings by default. This would allow pages to look good in the device in question, but also be fully configurable --- including for those art-nuts who care to pay to have the very best of fonts and displays.
However, the idea has not been taken far enough. Besides sans, sans-serif, and cursive, we could use lots of extra "semantic" font names like fantasy, futuristic, etc.
Yeah, the web went downhill back when they started embedding images in the pages. Who, I mean, who would want to see GRAPHICS in the middle of your CLEAN, SEMANTIC INFORMATION? It doesn't WORK and it's an OUTRAGE!
Once this hits mainstream, you will be *wishing* for Comic Sans when entering new site and waiting for font to load. And papyrus would be godsend which you will celebrate by writing email to webmaster and thanking him.
-- Technology for the sake of technology is as pathetic as eschewing technology because it's technology.
So what's the deal with "typekit"?
Their blog grandly announces (or at least strongly implies) that they've solved the licensing/theft/etc problems with downloadable fonts, without using DRM, but while there's a lot of handwaving, they don't actually seem to go into any detail about how they've "solved" it.
Does anybody know?
We live, as we dream -- alone....
Embeded font is there. Is unusable for a long period of time, maybe 5, maybe 10 years. Once the old browsers are forgothen and the new browsers dominate.
As long as your design degrades gracefully in browsers that don't support the new bells and whistles there is no problem using the latest and greatest. I don't see a problem from the user's point-of-view with giving people with the newest browser your "best" look and people with older browsers the "good enough" look.
Of course this may introduce a technical problem for you the designer because you might need to be extra careful to make sure you test that the design does indeed degrade gracefully - but that is the price you pay for playing close to the bleeding edge.
I can see this being *very* irritating if certain PHBs and corporate branding people catch wind of the new feature. First they'll demand to have the corporate font used for all pages, will be told that it will look different on older browsers (which they'll say "fine" to without actually taking in what is being said). Then a couple of weeks later they'll visit the site on Aunt Betty's old machine with IE6 and FF1.5 and demand that the site should look the same on all, and we'll be back to having sites that use images (or proprietary plugins) for all text just to get the fonts right...
You change one css[sic] rule and all the logical kinds of content it applies to all change. [sic]this facilitiates[sic] accessibility and comprehension of a documents[sic] logical layout by the reader. [sic]presumably the latter desiderata is the real goal, not pretty looking documents. [sic]given that, there is a large benefit to users if web pages look a lot alike. it puts less burden on the end user to decipher the page and access it's[sic] content if qualtiatively[sic] different authors web pages dont[sic] differ from each other in too many ways.
CSS is meant to ensure that styles within a site are consistent and logical (though it still has many shortcomings in that regard), not to make sites across the web somehow conform to the same set of styles.
Designers use CSS to define the look of their page, and set the font, which affects (sometimes dramatically), the reader's perception and comprehension of the written content. If you view the look of the page as somehow completely separated from the style in which it is presented, you are falling into an old trap which holds that content is not at all affected by the form in which it is presented, that the medium does not affect the message. And if you think the only reason for changing fonts is 'pretty looking documents', you've misunderstood the function of typography.
You don't have to be a font nerd to decry the appalling typography that passes for acceptable on the web (which you are claiming is some sort of standard we should all adhere to), the lack of subtlety in the default fonts chosen and typography available, and the general philistinism which holds that online typography has nothing to learn from older uses of type and CSS 2.1 is good enough for everyone.
PS For someone who's so hot on accessibility and comprehension, you don't seem very keen on using the cues provided by the English language to improve comprehension (i.e. punctuation and capital letters).
Why?
Why is font licensing any different from image licensing? The page directs you to (optionally) download font information. Your computer either does or does not. If it does, it uses the font information to render something on the page. As the server gave you this information when your computer asked for it, you legitimately have a copy. However, you are not allowed to redistribute this copy to a third party unless you have a license to do so, else you are in breach of copyright.
It's just a bunch more bits that you've downloaded off of a server. How are these bits any different from any other bits?
(Is there a missing href in the story?)
Why doesn't the gene pool have a life guard?
I should know - I used to do it for a living. However, they are easily stolen, and fonts that once cost serious bucks are now (essentially) free. Which is why I don't do it for a living anymore. But I'm not discussing that - what I am pointing at is if you can embed fonts in a page, it is a trivial exercise to open a font, "clean" the points (creating a new drawing of the font), and then export the thing with a new name. So, you could take Arial, fry it up, and come out with Ariel. Now someone might notice something fishy about Ariel, noting it similarity to Arial. In the USA, the DESIGN of a font is something you cannot copyright. Only the software that is the font file itself. This is what torpedoed the type industry back in the mid 1990s, in Adobe vs SSI (?) case in Florida.
Sure, SSI got sued by Adobe for this, but that was pre-www - back in the day of centralised font distribution systems on floppies or CDs. MS or Adobe would have to chase down thousands of people with take-down notices. The FROEI (financial return on energy invested) would be microscopic and an endless battle due to variations in international laws.
Another strategy would be DRM. This would work on new DRM fonts, but there are literally tens of thousands of older fonts (from ancient PostScript to TrueType to newer OpenType) that are not DRM'd and they would be all over the place, effectively smothering any DRM font system.
Flash was developed initially as an animation system, but quickly it became obvious that it opened up font use, even if the test is not animated. Flash has its own and deeply obvious problems, and I look forward to its death. That said, at the time it served a useful purpose. With AJAX and now font-face, I don't see much future for Flash at all, outside of its original use as an animation engine.
I'm of mixed feelings on this - as I noted, a good font is hard to make. However, the basic digital fonts were developed way back in the 1980s and early 1990s and have only been updated for new technology (unicode, opentype, etc.) and one would think that there is little point to grinding more and more out of them, except in terms of petty greed. If Adobe had their way, we never would have seen TrueType and you would have to pay $100 for every typeface and each would have to be installed on only your machine. Of course, it would look very good. If MS had their way, everything would be TrueType and you could only use the fonts that come installed with the OS, and any extra would be excluded at the OS level... and they would all suck. So, the piracy of the 1990s (fueled by the ancient Titan and venerable program, Fontographer) led to an explosion of fonts. Most of them craptastic, but a true example of digital creativity. Some/Many were obvious rip-offs, but their hinting was often crap - delta hints were almost always missing, their letterspacing worse, and the kerning either atrocious or non-existent.
Tools, including Fontographer (resurrected by FontLab, bless their hearts) have improved since 1993, and so have "amateur" fonts. However, the market for fonts is still very poor as the saturation level increases daily.
Net result? If MS adopts @font-face for IE, game over (in a good way), and we will see a flowering of online type design. If MS drags its heels on this, @font-face could die on the vine, and we'll be stuck with Arial, for a VERY long time.
So, here's hoping @font-face spreads like crazy, and we can finally get some decent looking pages going...
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
I think I'm going to be [sic]
I for one would find it very useful, for embedding things like sexagesimal numerals, e.g http://autonomyseries.com/autonomy-canon/community-standard-sexagesimal/ right now uses an aging wordpress plugin to display sexagesimal.ttf glyphs. Being able to embed "@font=sexagesimal.ttf" (or whatever the syntax is) would be very handy, but not if we're forced to convert our ttfs to Microsoft's worthless alternative format.
As for Microsoft's pathetic excuse that someone, somewhere might violate a copyright at some point in time my response is: so what? Just because someone, somewhere might violate someone's asinine copyright on a particular implementation of the alphabet's 26 letters, doesn't mean monopolists like Microsoft have any business throwing roadblocks in the way of the rest of us, who design our own fonts and want to be able to display and distribute them simply, seamlessly, and painlessly in standard, open formats. This isn't about protecting copyrights on fonts, its about Microsoft making sure IE isn't quite compatible with every other browser, and making sure we have to use their tools if we want anything to work on their dominant platform (and, if history is anything to judge by, eventually buy a license to do so). It's about muscling in on web standards to the detriment of everyone else, and I for one am fed up with it. I'm delighted Firefox, Opera, and Apple are embracing this. Hopefully they'll do the same with ogg-vorbis and other open standards, so we can have a complete web stack (including fonts and multimedia) that is unencumbered by American software patents, Microsoft (or anyone else's) proprietaryisms, sometimes-expensive licensing of third party products, and proprietary formats that only run on one or two widespread platforms.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
In the '80s those of us not using English had a real problem with fonts in that we had no uniform way of having what we wrote appear on a screen or printer. I remember embedding printer control escape sequences that would back the print head up and then print a slash or tick over what was there so people could understand what letter it was. But even back then people were complaining about not having fancy fonts when there was this real problem. Remember font cartridges for printers?
Now the real problem is largely solved but these font weenies are still coming-up with crazy schemes to make text look a certain particular way and it is pretty ridiculous the amount of effort that has been spent over the years on this with schemes that end-up only working for a few short years before something new shows-up on the horizone when for the most part electronic text is about information rather than the appearance. Don't try and tell me that this is simple until you look up EOT.
This is exactly how Microsoft can stop progress of web and in fact, the entire progress in computer/software industry.
Once they don't support something or support it in a way that is impossible to implement in other platforms, that thing is dead.
Don't hold your breath for them to support a multi platform way of doing things. That is how every webmaster ended up using Flash for drop down menus and also the reason why they hate Flash enough to ship a 'me too' joke.
I still think this can only improve your situation. As you said, you can use your own CSS, or none at all (in FireFox: View > Page Style > No Style). You may be too lazy to change it, but at least you'll have the option.
People already use non-standard fonts on web pages. They just use images or Flash or whatever, which gives the user zero control over appearance.
Additional benefits: since these wacky fonts will be sent as actual text, you'll still be able to Control+F search them, resize them, index them with a search engine, or have them read to you if you're blind.
There're scarcely more than 5 or 6 opensource / creative commons fonts which are:
- suitable for use as body copy
- not clones / knockoffs of extant fonts
- available in formats compatible w/ the technology in the original article
- and which people would actually be interested in using
As much as I like it, I doubt anyone will want to use Latin Modern (the OpenType version of Computer Modern). Others lack an italic, &c.
Actually all this begs the question of what typographic controls are available? Can one access things like contextual ligatures and the ssalt## (stylistic alternates 1--20) tags?
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
Loaded into rendering code? I hope this is well-sandboxed! I see nothing about the context in which these are loaded.
I fear this could be a way to load more nasties on yer little incubator.
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
From the Slashdot post:
> (...) latest versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, and Opera - recognize a CSS rule known as @font-face
From the linked page viewed in IE7:
> "This demo appears as intended only in Firefox 3.5"
The demo page shows the issue so clearly: You forgot IE. IE8 still doesn't have font-face support for TTF which is possibly the only format people will like to use.
I work with CSS most of my day but I doubt that I will have the pleasure of setting up sites with custom fonts for several years to come with the release cycles and popularity of IE as we have it today. For now we can be happy that IE8 can actually pass the acid2 test.
Regards
Seph
It worked fine for me in Opera 10. In fact, the page showed about six or seven different fonts in Opera 10, versus only about four in Firefox.
Here is a screenshot I took comparing how it looked in Opera 10 versus FF 3.5:
Screenshot
I don't get it. Both the summary and the line at the top of the page say that the page is optimized for Firefox 3.5, so why the hell does Opera show *more* fonts? Is it failing somehow in FF or is Opera somehow going above and beyond what the page designer intended? :)
Based on your screenshot, it looks like a bug in Opera. There are several places in the Opera version where the font changes right after the text includes the term "@font-face", but there are no styles in the source that seem to indicate that it should do so. Look at how the font changes in the middle of the opening paragraph in the middle of this string "of the @font-face CSS rule. How can @font-face be used". Then the same thing happens in the first "Note" *and then carries on to later paragraphs* even though there is nothing in the HTML that indicates a change in style except a span around just the word "Note" and a small link.