[OpenFontLibrary] Firefox 3.5 showing off @font-face prominently

[Liam R E Quin]

On Wed, 2009-06-17 at 21:30 +0200, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:

> The cynical part of me says:
> 
> Scenario A. Commercial web site:
> 1. design departments will still swear by whatever expensive fonts Adobe
> puts in its products

Libre/Free is not about dollar price. (Adobe's fonts are actually fairly
inexpensive as commercial fonts go, by the way)

> 2. since no foundry is ever going to allow such a font to be shared via
> non-drmed @font-face, they'll pass on @font-face and specify arial

This isn't entirely true.  Some foundries are considering allowing it,
although they'd be much happier with EOT, or with the light obfuscation
that Sampo proposed, enough that the font has to be copied
intentionally.  Many marketing departments want to keep strict control
on the corporate typefaces and how they're used, but many others don't.

> 3. technicians will put Arial in the css
> 4. If people complain arial is not available on their system, they'll
> link an arial ttf file since their understanding is it's "free"
> 
> Scenario B. Hobbyist web site:
> 1. will fell in love with @font-face (just like when "marble"
> backgrounds, gif dingbats and blinking tags were the new fad)
> 2. will download some hideous dubiously licensed ascii-only font on
> dafont, and link it
> 3. 8 months later, when enough people have complained it was a terrible
> idea, will put back arial everywhere
I think this is a very likely scenario

> 
> Scenario C. I18n web site:
> 1. will try to locate i18n fonts for its i18n users
> 2. will forget about them afterwards
> 3. 3 years later, everyone visiting the non-English pages will still get
> force fed old buggy fonts even if better replacements have long been
> available (this is what happens in apps that do not use fontconfig and
> bundle their own fonts. I've audited enough of them this year to know it
> by now)
At least users may then be able to use the Web site.
> 
> Where is the goodness in there?

This is sort of like saying there's no point using Linux at all, because
programs written by professional programmers will obviously never be
Free, and hobbyists write crap that crashes all the time.

Maybe we all just need a group hug? :)

Liam


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