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
... how long before some hack turns this into an exploit for new self-installing viruses?
"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.
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.
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!
What, like images, video, or plugin content like Flash games?
Of course there are security risks. And if this tech uses system font APIs, interfaces not normally subjected to the same security scrutiny as those of, say, images, then there will need to be some security code auditing.
I'm certain there will be a few exploit events before the situation settles down. But we can't stop the progress of useful functionality just because there might be some unknown security flaw. This an isn't ActiveX situation. Fonts do not contain executable code. A perfectly secure font reader should be relatively easy to write.
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.
Well, how do you think those HTML pages, CSS sheets, JS files, images, and plugin files (flash,java,etc) work?
Download -> run trough interpreter -> render output
It depends on the interpreter. And I say that one is the same for any font, and therefore you could also use maybe an obscure Unicode character to wreak havoc in the interpreter. No matter what font it is.
Somehow I have the feeling that you do not understand how web pages work.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
I think I'm going to be [sic]
Wow, somebody is grumpy...and ill informed.
Licensing? Resolvable. No different than "copyrighted" images and the licensing for them. Honest developers will use properly licensed material (fonts, images, etc), dishonest or uninformed developers won't care.
Bandwidth? At 50-100k they are not that much compared to swf files or large images previously used (also, you can cache them)
Security? Security patches will come as they arise. How is this different than any other "potential for abuse"?
Compatibility? Does degrade nicely, you can specify the web fonts but fall back to "traditional" fonts
Gains? Designers will have flexibility! They won't have to rely on images to produce "nice fonts" and the pages can be more semantic (text > images). This is just a few of the potential gains.
Do you really want to hold back progress because YOU think something is stupid and YOU would prefer no styling at all just standard html? Also, you do not have to "DOWNLOAD every font mentioned on a page", just the ones you want to specify, so get your facts straight before you jump to irrational conclusions. Get your morning coffee, relax and realize that this is progress even if you don't see the benefit in the implementation/execution.
When I have a kid, I want to put him in one of those strollers for twins and then run around the mall looking frantic.
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.