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Sure, but there has been this stalemate between font foundries and web designers for well over 10 years. I think this whole @font-face (1) thing is exactly wha

Sure, but there has been this stalemate between font foundries and web designers for well over 10 years. I think this whole @font-face (1) thing is exactly what is needed to shake some sense into the foundries. Designers will start using the fonts they love, without needing to create a graphic, then the foundries will start freaking out and (hopefully) innovate new, standards-based methods of using a designer-chosen font without sacrificing the usage rights of said font. As a slightly different argument, using a font via @font-face is no different than using a graphic. Graphics can have usage permissions associated with them just like a font, so why do we need to invent a new means of distributing licensed fonts?

jerf 18y ago
"innovate new, standards-based methods of using a designer-chosen font without sacrificing the usage rights of said font." Innovation can only do what is possible. If the font foundries want it to be physically impossible to "steal" the font, there is simply no way to square that with making the font available over the web for the purpose of rendering it, without sacrificing too much usability to make it worth doing. Maybe IE can do it (although even then only dangerously, if you want it to be really secure), but there's no way to make it possible for Firefox, KHTML, and other open source browsers to use the font, but impossible to download it. They're just too open for that. And any solution based on leaving them out in the cold is rapidly becoming infeasible as IE may still have market share, but is very nearly the last closed-source browser of any significant still standing. Leave the handwaving of "innovative" solutions to impossible problems to the government.
- Silhouette 18y ago
  You don't have to make it impossible, just awkward enough that (a) there is some incentive to pay up for the real thing, and more importantly (b) casual users who don't even know what copyright says or that ripping is illegal can't Just Do It. It would probably suffice to develop a standard where only an embedded subset of the font was transmitted by the web server, so you couldn't just download and install the .otf file or equivalent. That would probably save a worthwhile amount of bandwidth with modern fonts and their huge file sizes, too.
  - jerf 18y ago
    "You don't have to make it impossible," As it stands right now, you do, because the font foundries won't stand for anything less. If they were happy with probabilities they would have been in the game a long time ago. Note this is a social thing, not a technical thing.
    - Silhouette 18y ago
      My point was just that there is scope for a middle ground, where commercial font developers have some basic protection against drive-by copying but there is nothing so stupid and inhibiting that it prevents practical use of the fonts. Those foundries that choose not to work with such a scheme will inevitably find themselves at a commercial disadvantage relative to those that choose to do so.

jerf 18y ago

"innovate new, standards-based methods of using a designer-chosen font without sacrificing the usage rights of said font." Innovation can only do what is possible. If the font foundries want it to be physically impossible to "steal" the font, there is simply no way to square that with making the font available over the web for the purpose of rendering it, without sacrificing too much usability to make it worth doing. Maybe IE can do it (although even then only dangerously, if you want it to be really secure), but there's no way to make it possible for Firefox, KHTML, and other open source browsers to use the font, but impossible to download it. They're just too open for that. And any solution based on leaving them out in the cold is rapidly becoming infeasible as IE may still have market share, but is very nearly the last closed-source browser of any significant still standing. Leave the handwaving of "innovative" solutions to impossible problems to the government.

Silhouette 18y ago
You don't have to make it impossible, just awkward enough that (a) there is some incentive to pay up for the real thing, and more importantly (b) casual users who don't even know what copyright says or that ripping is illegal can't Just Do It. It would probably suffice to develop a standard where only an embedded subset of the font was transmitted by the web server, so you couldn't just download and install the .otf file or equivalent. That would probably save a worthwhile amount of bandwidth with modern fonts and their huge file sizes, too.
- jerf 18y ago
  "You don't have to make it impossible," As it stands right now, you do, because the font foundries won't stand for anything less. If they were happy with probabilities they would have been in the game a long time ago. Note this is a social thing, not a technical thing.
  - Silhouette 18y ago
    My point was just that there is scope for a middle ground, where commercial font developers have some basic protection against drive-by copying but there is nothing so stupid and inhibiting that it prevents practical use of the fonts. Those foundries that choose not to work with such a scheme will inevitably find themselves at a commercial disadvantage relative to those that choose to do so.