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Font Foundries Opening Up To the Web
Tiger4 writes "A huge number of fonts are migrating from the print-only world to the Web. As the browser manufacturers get on board, the WWW will be a much more interesting place (see the article illustration). 'Beginning Tuesday, Monotype Imaging, a Massachusetts company that owns one of the largest collections of typefaces in the world, is making 2,000 of its fonts available to Web designers. The move follows that of San Francisco-based FontShop, which put several hundred of its fonts online in February. In just a few weeks, Font Bureau, a Boston designer of fonts, will make some of its typefaces available online as well.' With any luck, the transition period to font-richness will be briefer and less painful than the waving-flag, jumping-smiley, flashing-text era HTML explosion."
This sounds like just what I need: more 100KB unanticipated downloads while I'm stuck at the end of an unreliable slow cellular modem connection. What ever happened to using the web to deliver information instead of "art"? At least browsers can ignore the new font specifications and still display something useful, unlike what happens with high-fashion websites implemented entirely in Flash. As we know, "Flash home page" == "Hold on to your wallet". Will it be the same for fancy fonts, too?