[Openfontlibrary] SVG Fonts as a replacement for EOT?

[Nicolas Spalinger]

[...]

> The better solution is to have browser support for the @font-face
> rules.  That way the browser can take advantage of either
> Freetype-Pango-HarfBuzz-Cairo or the OS' native support for OpenType
> features.  And maybe someday we will also have Graphite integration in
> the FOSS type rendering stack too, which would also be very beneficial.
> 
> With WebKit under the hood, Google's Chrome browser will be easily able
> to support @font-face as soon as the developers decide to turn this
> feature on.  So then we will have Safari and Chrome with @font-face
> support.  And doesn't Opera have it too?  We'll have to see where
> Firefox falls out on this -- I don't currently understand the state of
> progress on @font-face support in FF.

Seeing how the Acid3 tests includes @font-face, and webkit and Opera
have announced 100/100 pass, hopefully it's on track for Mozilla
browsers too. There's some discussion on:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=70132
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roc/archives/2008/08/the_coming_batt.html

Maybe others on the list here have more details from previous discussions.

> In any case, as George Williams points out, Dojo's solution doesn't
> change anything on the licensing front.  Is the Dojo developer Tom
> Trenka really suggesting that their SVG solution avoids licensing
> issues?  If so, I wonder what he was smoking?

Indeed, a format conversion doesn't get rid of the upstream designer's
licensing choice! IMHO he makes various misleading assumptions in some
of these paragraphs (there are also valid points). But it seems replying
on the blog entry isn't working (can't tell if it's in the moderation
queue or not...).

I think exposing the path of the font source and the font
licensing/authorship metadata in the framework and in the browser is
part of the solution. (I'm thinking of CC-like visual
representation/human-readable licensing representation and infos like
copyright, license, license_url, designer, designer_url, manufacturer,
description). Anybody willing to help with a browser extension to
achieve that?

> Best - Ed Trager

-- 
Nicolas Spalinger
http://planet.open-fonts.org


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