[OpenFontLibrary] Firefox 3.5 is out!

[Liam R E Quin]

On Wed, 2009-07-01 at 11:27 -0400, Joshua A.C. Newman wrote:

> Yeah, I remember that this is an old thing. But now there is a
> standard.

It depends on what you mean by a standard...

MS IE *does* implement the Web Fonts standard as published
by W3C; there's no requirement for a specific font format,
and if there had been, it might well have been PostScript
Type 1 at the time, since TrueType was patent-encumbered.
Or it might have been the SVG font format, with no hinting,
and very limited metadata...

There's no problem with serving up Libre fonts with EOT,
and Microsoft and Agfa-Monotype have released the details
of the format, making the GPL implementation possible.

There is, of course, a problem in serving non-Free fonts
(including most shareware fonts) as plain TrueType/otf files,
which is that the terms of usage don't generally permit it.

We'll see changes in that area soon, I'm sure, but I think
in this case it's a little unfair to blame Microsoft for
supporting downladable fonts on the Web.  There are still
lots of other things where you can blame Microsoft, so don't
worry, just let this one go :-)

Liam




-- 
Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/
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