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Will W3C Accept DRM For Webfonts?
Posted by
timothy
on Thu Aug 28, 2008 02:25 PM
from the magic-8-ball-time dept.
from the magic-8-ball-time dept.
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?"
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Submission: Will W3C accept DRM for webfonts? by Anonymous Coward
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Will W3C Accept DRM For Webfonts?
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Loaded question (Score:5, Funny)
Gee, I wonder what
Re:Loaded question (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course we need options/extensions to over ride fonts when the Myspace-Unreadability-Guild (TM) figures out that black on black in weird grunge font looks good.
Parent
Re:Loaded question (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Loaded question (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Loaded question (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Loaded question (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [glyphics.info], 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 [utexas.edu] 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 [sourceforge.net], 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!
Parent
Re:Loaded question (Score:5, Informative)
You only need 3 fonts. A serif, a san-serif, and a fixed width. For English at least.
Parent
Re:Loaded question (Score:4, Informative)
You're doing it wrong. Both yogh [wikipedia.org] and wynn [wikipedia.org] have unicode code points. They work [fileformat.info] just fine [fileformat.info] here.
Parent
Re:Loaded question (Score:5, Insightful)
Designers with formal design background know that that list is all you really need.
SARCASM
Ah! That explains why word processing software like MS Word, OpenOffice.org and AbiWord only offer those same nine fonts, and there is no more advanced print design software. The next time I see Quark XPress or Adobe InDesign running, I'll be sure to treat them as the hallucinations they are. Thanks for clearing up those mysteries. END SARCASM
I direct your attention to the following:
1) The Principles of Beautiful Web Design, by Jason Beaird. He has formal graphic design training, wrote a book on the topic, and does not appreciate having his options limited to nine fonts.
2) The Non-Designer's Design Book and The Non-Designer's Typography Book, both by Robin Williams. She's not only a trained graphic designer who has written several books on the topic, but one who works primarily in print. She loves her typography, and really hates the limited nature of fonts on the web (see The Non-Designer's Web Design Book for that).
I wouldn't WANT anything else used as the primary font. Imagine having to read paragraphs of crap using FancySwirlyCrap.ttf, because some designer thought it was cool. Ugh, no f'ing thanks.
Sure. People will make crappy web pages with crappy designs that hurt your eyes. Guess what? They already do. I'd tell you to go browse MySpace for a couple hours, but I'm not that cruel.
Meanwhile, the good designers who know what they're doing are crippled.
Use the standard fonts, that's why that list is exactly what it is.
The list is that way because of Microsoft's Core Fonts for the Web program, initiated in 1996. The basic aim of the program was to give web designers some kind of consistent control over the typography in their sites -- prior to that time, you just had to pick a font and take your chances.
Readability was one consideration in the list of fonts they settled on, sure. But the basic aim was to improve designer's control over the default fonts. It achieved that goal well. And now it's time to move on.
Happily, it looks to me as though this is going to happen, regardless of whether everyone likes it or not. I'm sure they'll give you a configuration setting to turn off web fonts, though, so you can go on reading Times New Roman and Arial until the end of your days if you'd like.
Parent
Re:Loaded question (Score:5, Insightful)
And web design may not be for you. Set your damn user style sheet and it'll override whatever attractive layout the designer provided for you with whatever ugly font you want.
I'm not a designer, but let's stop pretending it's 1995.
Parent
Re:Loaded question (Score:5, Insightful)
If you are worried over semantics, HTML may not be the media for you.
If you are worried over accessibility, HTML may not be the media for you.
Where did you come up with this? The main focus of web standards in the last 5+ years has been making the markup more semantic and more accessible—hell, that's one of the main purposes of CSS. Now please leave the web design profession.
Parent
Re:Loaded question (Score:5, Insightful)
Use font-family, do NOT specify a font for me. I, or my browser, will choose the font.
My page, my design. But feel free to use a browser that does anything you want to the pages you want to display. But the vast majority of the rest of the world likes visiting well-designed pages.
Parent
Re:Loaded question (Score:5, Insightful)
A well designed page has no care for the specific font that is used, only the style of font and size.
No, that's a particular *design option* that may or may not be important to the design specification. In certain other cases, it's important to exercise tight control of the maximum width of some text, and that requires specifying the font. For example, I might have a news site with a headline box, and I want each headline to fit on one line without line-breaking and making it look crappy (with a bunch of lines with a single word on each second line). Now, if someone chooses to change the fonts, then it degenerates the way it degenerates. But for most of the world, it will look like a clean, polished design.
And no, not every page needs to be auto-sizing to the width of the browser... that's also a design option that may or may not be appropriate for every design.
Unfortunately, too many people think that the whole concept of "the HTML dictates the content, and the browser dictates the look" from the far past is somehow carved in stone tablets given by God. It's not. The point of a browser is to communicate with a web site, and there are a lot of different ways to do that.
Parent
Re:Loaded question (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Parent
Re:Loaded question (Score:5, Funny)
5% will think "That depends on how much money Microsoft spends to pack voting bodies with sock puppets."
10% will think "So what, I won't use it anyway."
50% will think "Microsoft will do whatever it wants anyway."
90% will be various trolls and flamebait.
Disclaimer: totals do not add to 100% because some contestants qualify for more than one category. Contents may have settled in shipping. 186,000 miles a second.... it's not just a good idea, it's the law. No animals were harmed in testing this product. Fnord.
Parent
Re:Loaded question (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the majority of responses will be:
"Why do I need all these flashy fonts on the web anyway! I have my browser show every website in Courier 10, and daggummit, that's the way every site should be! Back when I was a kid we didn't have none of these fancy fonts and we were all happier. Websites with Flash on them are basically Satan!!! GET OFF MY LAWN!"
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Yay! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Yay! (Score:5, Funny)
I haven't been so excited since JWZ came up with BLINK.
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Re:Yay! (Score:5, Interesting)
I worked in IT for a summer when I was in college. The company's art department always needed much more powerful computers than the others. As I was setting the machines up, I discovered why they needed such fancy hardware. It was all the damn fonts! Those things made the machines so slow, it was ridiculous.
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Re:Yay! (Score:5, Insightful)
The thing is that font designs aren't actually copyrightable in the US. Microsoft etc get round that by copyrighting the "font software", ie they argue that the .ttf file is actually a computer program that displays the font, and that computer program as distinct from the font design it dispays is copyrightable.
Parent
Srsly? (Score:5, Interesting)
The thing is that font designs aren't actually copyrightable in the US
Really? So if I make a program that takes an Adobe font, renders it into very high resolution raster, do edge detection on that, and write back my own TTF file, I can freely redistribute them? No design patents or anything?
Parent
Beware of trademarks (Score:5, Informative)
Don't use the same name, they're usually Trademarked.
And if you copied 100% of the size hinting, they would claim you were copying the program portion.
But, in essence, yes.
Parent
Re:PDF (Score:4, Insightful)
But fonts can do a lot of things nonetheless: they might contain drop-caps that don't turn into a nasty pixelated mess when printed,
like this [mandarindesign.com]?
Why should the people who do want nice features and customization be forced to suffer because the majority simply doesn't care or won't notice?
Are you talking about PDF, or HTML?
If you want to deliver a print-quality document, use a format that's designed for print-quality output, like a Postscript derivative like PDF, not one that's designed for readability on a huge variety of display devices at the cost of accurate rendering.
Parent
DRM on FONTS?! (Score:5, Interesting)
Next they'll have DRM on colors.
Re:DRM on FONTS?! (Score:5, Funny)
Pantone would love that!
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Re:DRM on FONTS?! (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:DRM on FONTS?! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re:DRM on FONTS?! (Score:5, Interesting)
To be honest, the DRM on fonts is a bit overblown. To create an EOT, you must supply the *beginning* part of the URL to which the font is bound. This is, unfortunately, done with DNS.
That said, if you created "MyDomain1.com", "MyDomainCool.com", "MyDomainIsBest.com", etc., you would need only to generate an EOT bound to "http://mydomain" and it works on all those domains I listed.
Now, though I've said these things, I will also say that EOT is terrible, having worked with it off and on for several years. I'm *dying* for true web fonts in CSS to finally take hold.
One thing many people posting here forget is all the foreign character sets that are not necessarily represented with fonts on an end-user's system. Good luck displaying all of Pashto on an English Win2k machine without (1) fonts installed directly on the machine or (2) web fonts.
Parent
Doesn't matter (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Doesn't matter (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Your browser doesn't support ANSI X3.64! (Score:5, Funny)
Just because a standard exists ^[1mdoesn't^[0m mean it has to be supported.
Parent
what is the point? (Score:2, Redundant)
Why not just assume that it will get cracked, then not implement DRM in the first place?
Point isn't DRM, but the leverage provided (Score:5, Insightful)
The DRM itself isn't the point. The point is the leverage that DRM provides, when combined with dubious things like the DMCA and the BSA. The point is that this gives MS one more club with which to beat people. "Our unannounced raid on your offices shows that you've used our fonts without authorization. Under the provisions of the DMCA, you are now liable for criminal charges ... or we could instead graciously *license* those fonts to you for the mere sum of US$200K, and forget this ever happened."
The DRM itself is not the point. It is merely the means to another end.
Cheers,
Parent
DRM fonts now! (Score:1)
http://bancomicsans.com/home.html [bancomicsans.com]
Most web sites use Windows standard fonts anyway (Score:4, Insightful)
If you design a web site, you want it to show up looking roughly the same on most browsers. For simplicity's sake, most people use the standard fonts (and Mac equivalents).
http://www.ampsoft.net/webdesign-l/WindowsMacFonts.html [ampsoft.net]
If we're going to be embedding fonts, obviously we want as few boring, cumbersome procedures as possible. Forcing us to regenerate pages to approve font use counts as one of these.
Microsoft is barking up the wrong tree on this one.
standards are the way to go (Score:1)
Bogus (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
This isn't a problem anymore (Score:4, Interesting)
Bad idea (Score:2)
If we allow people to use custom fonts, they'll just start using weird fonts for internationalization instead of unicode. They'll lie and claim to be 8859-1, and in the end, we'll just return a web of babel.
Completely ineffectual DRM (Score:2)
I've read the EOT spec [w3.org]. The DRM is trivally, hilariously bad:
In addition, whilst it is possible to embed only those glyphs needed, anyone who's using a CMS is realistically going to be embedding all the glyphs needed for the language anyway.
So why bother?
Embedded OpenType (EOT) (Score:2)
OpenType.
Hey Microsoft, "Open", you keep using that word but I don't think it means what you think it means.
Alternate Acronym (Score:1)
DRM doesn't make sense for any standard (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
SIFR (Score:2)
If this helps get rid of the complete abomination that is SIFR [wikipedia.org], I'm all for it.
You've got to appreciate the fact that it actually works, but it is such a giant hack...
Brimming Over with Wrongability (Score:5, Insightful)
Thus, we don't even need to get to the copy protection issue -- the mere idea of binding fonts to an HTML page at all is utterly laughable on its face. It belies a fundamental misunderstanding of what HTML is and the set of problems it's intended to address.
If image is more important to you than content, then go play with PDF -- that's what it's for -- and leave HTML alone.
Schwab
Talk to Monotype (Score:1)
.
There are thousands of "free" fonts to be found on the web.
But the truth of it is that type design and typography on the professional level is as a ratified a skill as you will find anywhere:
Times New Roman dates from 1931. Baskerville from 1757. Bruce Rogers and His Centaur [harvardmagazine.com]
Expecting the first-tier foundries like Monotype to make a free gift of their most artful and significant designs is simply not realistic.
A no brainer (Score:2)
required reading (Score:3, Informative)
See the Wikipedia article and the W3C team comment on the submission
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embedded_OpenType [wikipedia.org]
http://www.w3.org/Submission/2008/01/Comment [w3.org]
Leave web alone! (Score:1)
No different than photos on the Web (Score:2)
Why isn't this an issue with rights-encumbered photos and images on the web?
You can buy photos today. Some are licensed for a Web audience, some are not. There are technologies to find illegal use of photos out there, and more coming.
Fonts can be same way - either licensed for a Web audience, or not. It should be trivial to detect those that abuse such licensing, much more so than images.
So - what is so special about fonts that they require the DRM treatment? Let the free market sort it out. If paying for Web license is too much, people will just use "standard" fonts, or they'll resort to using flash or other silliness.
I think artists, typographers, etc should be paid (Score:4, Funny)
Remember the ISO "vote" (Score:2)
Slimy? (Score:1)
The key section of their propaganda (Score:1)
Note who their constituency is. Not Web designers. Not users. Not browser makers. Not the health of the Web, etc. This page is to lobby Font Shops to modify their EULA's to allow EOT. Most high-end font shops don't allow embedding at all unless it's in an image. Check out HF&J's ridiculous policy [typography.com].
Font embedding is a good thing (Score:2)
While I am against Microsoft's vision of DRM-laden fonts (the internet is open and free dammit) I welcome the future of font embedding. It would be a huge boon towards a semantic, searchable and accessible web. Designers would have no reason to insert images (or Flash [mikeindustries.com]) in place of text order to get the desired typographic effect.
Before you say "HTML is semantic, there is no place for presentation it the spec!" read the actual proposal, it's for the CSS spec, not HTML - right where presentation belongs. Quite frankly, it's silly that this isn't already in place given the rate that we continue to move away from print.
Umm. No. (Score:1)
Let's get one thing strait. You are going to download your fucking font onto my computer then tell me I can only use it in one program/page. How about you take that font and stick it in a hole of your choice.
This isn't DRM - read the spec (Score:3, Interesting)
Second, there are embedding flags (EOT spec, 4.1 [w3.org]). These are essentially a machine-readable copyright and license statement - it is absolutely trivial to manipulate this field. You could do it in a few dozen lines of code in the programming language of your choice, with no need to reverse engineer, drag out keys, whatever.
In short, nothing to see here. This slashdot article makes a big deal out of absolutely nothing.
rot13 and other substitution cyphers (Score:2)
Microsoft's new publicitary spots (Score:1)
Why is no one talking about the economics of fonts (Score:2)
The discussion here sucks. It's driven by design-luddite trolls setting up straw man arguments about why we're better off without font embeddability. Then it's followed up by the standard anti-DRM rhetoric.
Meanwhile nobody is talking about font piracy, which is actually a much huger problem than software, music or movie piracy. Because of the size of the market, size of the files, and the amount of work that goes into creating quality fonts, piracy can have a real detrimental effect on the industry, directly leading to a drastic reduction in new font production.
At /. everyone sees DRM through the lens of some of the terribly crippled and illegal schemes that have come in the past, and the RIAA's hostility towards its customers, running roughshod over fair-use, and disregard for quality in their own products.
But the font industry is another story. One that shows the effects of casual piracy to be very damaging. The idea of some lightweight DRM to prevent casual piracy at least merits consideration (not of the brittle phone-home variety). If copying fonts becomes a simple matter of save as... in any browser, we could enter a world where the font design industry shrivels up and can only come back with a more heavy-handed DRM format just to survive.
Re:Linux users install MS fonts??? (Score:1, Insightful)
Parent
10% will be "Who cares, I won't use it..." (Score:3, Interesting)
Font designers are not going to allow their creations to be installed and used for free on a million PCs.
Who cares...
The question here is whether or not we want the special fonts.
I won't use it anyway.
And BTW, that "monopoly" was greatly aided by the early Linux desktop adopters.
What in the name of Turing's Sainted Mother are you talking about?
Parent
Re:Monopoly (Score:1)
Parent
Re:Simple (Score:2)
Who cares what font designers say. US copyright law says they have no choice in the matter. Font designs are not copyrightable.
Parent
The 'DRM hole' (Score:3, Informative)
Any DRM system for 'public distribution' is destined for failure. Why? Because, ultimately, you have to give the end-user some way to decrypt the raw font/music/video/whatever. If the user can decrypt it, there is NOTHING that can technically stop them from extracting the unencrypted data (as long as someone, somewhere, can write an app which pretends to be the 'legitimate app', but in reality does something the 'legitimate app' does not, like offering to save the font data to a file for you).
Encryption works to protect data between 1 part and 1 other party, where those two parties agree to not share the data with anyone else. Trying to use encryption to protect 'mass-market' distribution is a logical impossibility. Either I can or cannot decrypt the data, and if I can, I've got it, and can potentially give it to others.
Parent
Open source DRM for the win! (Score:1)
I always wondered what the problem would be with establishing some sort of private/public key signature/encryption method of DRM.
Yes, open source DRM! Nobody would ever take advantage of the fact that if you're using DRM you're giving the recipient the encrypted data, the algorithm to decrypt it, and the key, to write a little tool that just strips the DRM off and web content you point it at! Even those commie open source people are that heartless!
Parent
Re:Linux users install MS fonts??? (Score:2)
I always found truetype fonts sucked period, and the adobe type1 fonts seemed to render better, especially when printed.
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Re:Linux users install MS fonts??? (Score:5, Informative)
I always found truetype fonts sucked period, and the adobe type1 fonts seemed to render better, especially when printed.
From a technical viewpoint, today, there is very little to distinguish the formats. TrueType only does quadratic Bezier curves where Type 1 does cubic, but it is trivial to interpolate cubic curves with quadratic ones, at a slight cost in code size.
When you buy fonts, the higher-quality fonts tend to be in the Type 1 format, but that is for historical reasons.
Parent
Re:Monopoly (Score:2)
[S]hould 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?"
Am I missing something? It seems to me that the very thing Microsoft is proposing - a standard for enforcing font file copy rights - is the thing the linked article suggests is necessary to break Microsoft's "monopoly" on web fonts.
I believe the monopoly referenced is MS's monopoly influence on the Web browser and, hence, Web technologies markets.
Parent
Re:Linux users install MS fonts??? (Score:2)
TrueType support still sucks on Linux by default: most distros use the dreadful Freetype auto-hinter, which inflicts unspeakably mangled contortions on font outlines in its misguided desperation to ensure that everything lines up exactly with pixels.
However, it is possible to configure it to use real TrueType hinting (if you like the Windows look and don't care about software patents), and it's also possible to turn hinting off completely and get fonts that look just like the ones on a Mac (very true to the printed appearance, but some people find them too blurry). Do whichever of those two things you prefer, and you can end up with something that you can read without wanting to claw out your own eyeballs in horror.
Yes; in fact it's not uncommon. For example, Debian's statistics [debian.org] suggest that msttcorefonts is by far the most popular package in their contrib/X11 section, though it's only 1/6 as popular as e.g. the DejaVu fonts.
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