[OpenFontLibrary] What's the big deal about @font-face anyway?

[Nicolas Spalinger]

Behdad Esfahbod wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I hope I don't get flamed for this.  I'm not a typophile, but an
> i18n'er. I've been working all my adult life making sure GNOME is
> accessible to people in any language they wish to use it with.  I fully
> understand the importance of having good, high quality, legible, fonts. 
> I also appreciate an Open font library. 

:-)

> I was making a video last week
> and wanted a fancy script font. Surfed to OFLB and downloaded one in
> under a minute.
> 
> What I don't understand is, why is it a good idea to let website
> designers choose what font *I* read their text with?  It's a basic
> usability question. I don't have Tahoma and Verdana and Arial installed
> for a reason.  I like the text I read the way I read it the easiest. 

You could always override other people's design choices in your own
browser if needed:
http://kb.mozillazine.org/UserContent.css
http://uwstopia.nl/blog/2006/01/my-fonts-are-better-than-yours

> So, please tell me, how is making it easier for website designers to
> enforce their type on me a good thing?

More freedom to them :-)

IMHO there will always be good and less good designs...
Beauty in the eyes of the beholder as they say but with an open web, the
beholder can tweak things to his linking too.

But I think for many people @font-face will be a great enabler: they
will have a much nicer solution for publishing content on the web (or
platforms using web-technologies) via open standards and have to worry
about pictures and problematic encodings to represent text.


> Thanks,
> behdad


-- 
Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer
Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary
http://planet.open-fonts.org


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