Hi, I forwarded your thoughtful comments to www-font :) Regards, Dave <blockquote>On 7 Aug 2009, 9:30 AM, "Nicolas Mailhot" <<a href="mailto:nicolas.mailhot@laposte.net">nicolas.mailhot@laposte.net</a>> wrote: Le Jeu 6 août 2009 22:43, Ben Weiner a écrit : > Hi there, Hi, > With Nicolas Spalinger's comments about font metadata (13:00 BST today) > fresh in my mind, I wan...I am personally not in favour of a web-only font format. Every other web content uses standard formats and the web is successful because moving content to and from the web does not have any barrier. That being said, this particular proposal is even worse than the previous ones since it makes it easy to create web fonts with site or web-specific names and ids. The whole FLOSS desktop font stack is built over extensive logic to substitute fonts whenever appropriate and possible. If you allow web fonts to use different ids than normal font files, you strip a large part of the info that makes this substitution effective. People will claim their web fonts will be perfect and do not need substitution, but we consider than the user is in control and should be given the means to refuse a font download if he wants to (to save bandwidth, for licensing reasons, because the web font is ugly or broken or stale or not refreshed to take into account new text added on the web site, etc). Also we've seen all too often web site creators that do not take our client specificities into account and assume Microsoft or Apple fonts are available to complete their design. We can workaround it with smart font management code but its efficiency will be greatly reduced in they have little data to make decisions from. For example, when TTF/OTF linking was imlemented in Firefox, Mozilla developers posted a set of examples. In one of them a well-known FLOSS font was used instead of Helvetica. But because the css rules linked the font file directly and never mentioned its real name, browsers would download it even if another (possibly more recent and better) version was already installed locally. The writer obviously considered the presence of this font unlikely, which is true for Apple and Microsoft systems, but false for Linux systems. -- Nicolas Mailhot </blockquote>