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?"
DRM on FONTS?! (Score:5, Interesting)
Next they'll have DRM on colors.
Re:Doesn't matter (Score:3, Interesting)
Indeed - support for @font-face [webkit.org] is already here in Safari and is being considered for Firefox.
font-face (not this MS EOT font stuff) is a real boon for web typography - I just wish the W3C had asked some designers/typographers their opinions earlier in the standards process, as currently type on the web is really poor. As for EOT - they tried that years ago, and it didn't take off because of.... DRM. I don't see what they think will be different this time round.
Here's hoping other browser manufacturers simply ignore Microsoft.
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.
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.
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?
This isn't a problem anymore (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:what is the point? (Score:2, Interesting)
Untrue. BD+ hasn't been cracked, but it hasn't really been used yet. Most BDs still use the same DRM HD-DVD used. (I forget what it's called.)
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.
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?
Re:Loaded question (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Right, the point of the web is communication. Anything that hinders communication is antithetical.
I'm all for lovely design, don't get me wrong, but PDF is a better language to describe layout than HTML and CSS.
Re:PDF (Score:3, Interesting)
and the half-implemented scheme Apple designed for Leopard.
Hey, Apple's been half-implementing that stuff for two decades! :)
OSX, nee OpenStep (nee NeXTStep), has been using resolution-independent display (DPS, DPDF) forever. Their GUI elements just don't support it yet. Word is they'll be getting off their butts to fix this for Snow Leopard. We'll see.
Expecting everyone to use PDFs for their eighty-bazillion DPI laz0r-displays or live with 72-DPI images standing in for what should be high-res vectors is not good enough.
I'm not following - why are inline PDF's or SVG's insufficient? Because IE doesn't have native SVG support?
Re:Loaded question (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Loaded question (Score:2, Interesting)
I mean it's not like Microsofts DRM pixie-dust can actually stop the fonts from being displayed. Once it's one your screen how many clicks before you can have it vectorized? Opps.
I think you'd loose hinting. I guess that's ok if you want to use the same point size as the webpage or don't care about it scaling correctly.