By contrast, one-time payments (as part of a license when you buy a font), granting you the ability to embed that font in a site, have potential. Sure, some people will cheat (just like some people steal photos). But others will pay, if the fee is reasonable and the terms are clear.

Nobody thought people would pay to download music until Apple came up with iTunes. Maybe we need Apple to get involved.

I’m just being a clown and not adding to the discussion. Well, actually, I’m making fun of the inevitable “let’s use micropayments” suggestions that will emerge if this issue becomes a mainstream(ish) debate.

Right now, the font foundries are controlling the pace of the development of web fonts, but they’re going too slow. They should be proactive and create a format that meets everyone’s needs. They could band together and release a large pack of free, open-sourced web fonts, which would at the very least satiate most web developers and buy more time. Anything besides dragging their feet would probably work.

If the font foundries don’t jump in here and identify a middle road that works for everyone, then consumers and developers are going to eventually pick a solution, and it’s going to be a solution that favors consumers and developers and almost definitely will either stomp all over the foundries’ licenses or take the foundries out of the equation completely, devastating their profits.

Step up, foundries! Musicians can avoid labels and promote online, journalists can avoid newspapers and publish online, and you’ll be next if you don’t step up.

You’ve minded me that I was peeved when OS X came with six weights of Helvetica Neue, since I already owned every weight of Helvetica Neue, and the system couldn’t run two sets of the same font. Installing OS X on a Classic machine immediately created this font management problem for me—at a time when early OS X had no font management to offer, and the font management tools I’d used for years weren’t compatible with OS X. For designers, it was a lose-lose.

I understand now that Apple was widening its appeal beyond its existing market of graphic designers (nearly all of whom, like me, already owned Helvetica Neue) and bringing Helvetica Neue to consumers.

Off-topic, of course, but your comment brought the experience back to me with a Proustian rush.

However, I don’t think the answer is to keep all pages at ~50kb. For users that are on desktop or laptop machines, they should get the richest experience we can provide in terms of photography, video and interface enhancements via scripts. For users on dialup, or using cell phones, or whatever, we should provide them with either a mobile version of our site (if traffic patterns warrant it) or at least provide a mobile ready gateway to our RSS feeds.

The beauty of having all these database driven websites is the ability to format our content for different audiences on different software. We should use it rather than handicap ourselves to the lowest common denominator.