Will W3C Accept DRM For Webfonts? 315
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?"
Doesn't matter (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Loaded question (Score:1, Insightful)
You seem a little bit confused. Here, let me help you.
1% will think "That depends on how much money Microsoft throws at the W3C.
4% will think "So what, I won't use it anyway."
35% will think "Microsoft should do whatever it pleases, nothing has stopped it from doing that anyway."
The remaining 60% will be various trolls and flamebait.
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.
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.
Re:Linux users install MS fonts??? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Yay! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:DRM on FONTS?! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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.
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.
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,
Re:Yay! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:DRM on FONTS?! (Score:2, Insightful)
Now, that's not to say that DRM has a place in web fonts, and that's certainly not to say that EOT is the way to implement it. Comparing a font to a color, though, is the utmost of absurdity.
Re:Loaded question (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Loaded question (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Re:Most web sites use Windows standard fonts anywa (Score:3, 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).
That's deeply foolish, you know. Users can (and do) set their own style sheets, and they are even more likely to change the size of the fonts in use. Expecting a page to look exactly as someone designed it to be is silly; "web designers" need to get used to the fact (and I've been going on about this on and off since before such a job description existed).
Re:PDF (Score:2, Insightful)
On top of that, this can sort of be correlated to the holocaust of the GNOME stupidity debate. 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? Body fonts can do a great many things with apparently subtle changes, from making a page look very antiquated to expressing emotions. Maybe not everyone notices it, but it still provides an important element of the experience tot hose who do.
Also, this could mean fewer flash banners made in the name of interesting fonts. (I can't think of any, but I'm sure it's been done.)
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.
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.
Re:Doesn't matter (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Brimming Over with Wrongability (Score:1, Insightful)
Stylesheets allow presentation specification, but the stylesheets were separated from HTML expressly to attempt to preserve HTML's semantic nature.
Yes, and web fonts are part of stylesheets, not HTML, so what's your point? It seems you're so eager to repeat your "HTML is not presentation" mantra that you have failed to grasp the relevant facts of the matter.
Re:Loaded question (Score:3, Insightful)
If you are worried over accessibility, HTML may not be the media for you.
Right, who cares about accessibility in the World Wide Web anyway?
FFS...
Re:DRM on FONTS?! (Score:3, Insightful)
This may come as a shock, but professionally-designed fonts can actually take a year or two to perfect. In terms of effort involved in creating them, DRM on music is probably more absurd.
This may come as a shock, but professionally-designed websites can actually take a year or two to perfect. In terms of effort involved in creating them, DRM on HTML and JavaScript has proven to be unnecessary.
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!
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!"
Re:Loaded question (Score:2, Insightful)
If you really need to create such a textbox please use images or Flash
Please not Flash. I know websites that use Flash for every single headline (with about a dozen headlines in a page, or more), when they could easily use an image or even text. This slows down the rendering of the page (or at least makes the rendering process awkward) and is especially ugly for people who don't happen to have Adobe Flash Plugin 9.0.124.0 installed or block it (i.e. FlashBlock).
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.
Re:Loaded question (Score:1, Insightful)
I'm not a print designer.
Didn't think so. Designers with formal design background know that that list is all you really need. Arial is a semi-clone of Helvetica, it's a good sans-serif font. Times New Roman will have you covered for serif. Georgia and Verdana are slightly off the beaten path for serif and sans-serif, respectively. 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.
I say no. Keep the web legible. Use the standard fonts, that's why that list is exactly what it is.
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.
Happily? (Score:3, Insightful)
You mean because the W3C was too stupid or lazy to provide a solution without the ridiculous layer of DRM?
I mean, I get that designers shouldn't be limited to an arbitrary set of 'approved' fonts. But what's the point of adding the proprietary layer on top of the TrueType/Opentype container? Why bring complexity when it clearly can't protect [autodesk.com] anything?