Serket Watches

It’s not a problem that four major browsers support @font-face. That’s great. IE should support the @font-face standard as well.

I agree that there are easier ways to steal fonts than getting them from your browser’s cache. I also understand the concerns of type designers. Don’t you?

Were type designers part of the conversation when @font-face was developed? If not, why not? It’s wonderful that there are type designers who freely license their work for use on the web, but what if I want to use a font that isn’t yet licensed for the web? Most aren’t.

To limit art directors and designers to the minority of fonts that are licensed for the web is not much better than limiting us to Georgia, Verdana, Arial, Courier, and Times. Everyone agrees that the train is leaving the station, and that type designers need to get on board. Type designers are trying to do just that. That’s why these proposals are out there.

Nobody’s the bad guy here. We need a standard all parties can agree to.

I appreciate your choosing our Sentinel typeface as an example. H&FJ isn’t so much “worried” about the situation as we are “inspired” to do something about it — our clients are eager to use fonts online, and we’re eager to help. Trying to get designers interested in the standards end of things is part of this, and I’m very grateful to Jeffrey for devoting his time and energies to talking about Tal and Erik’s .webfont proposal, David’s PERM table, and all the attendant strengths and weaknesses of the .EOT format. It’s going to be an interesting summer.

In any case, we hope to have some encouraging news for font fanciers soon, so I hope you’ll keep an eye on our blog at http://www.typography.com/ask.

I can only imagine that the average man and his dog don’t know what a font is, never mind care to look in the browser cache to find the font, then go and install it. I’d wager that that the majority of the people that care about fonts are designers. I can’t imagine that many people other than designers or developers of some kind have ever bought a font before. It isn’t a mass market product.

I’d expect that the amount of people that will take fonts fro the browser cache, that would have otherwise have bought the font would be very low. The potential benefit of the huge new market to sell fonts to–that is web designer–will far outweigh any potential losses in revenue from stealing fonts. Fonts are often hundreds of dollars–not many kids at school would pay hundreds of dollars for a font to include in a school project or such. If someone was likely to come and take a font from the browser cache and install it on their computer, then a much more convenient place to go get the font would be a file sharing app. There I can just type in the font name. To take one from a browser I first have to find a site that uses that font. Much less convenient.

@Zeldman I’m fully aware of the dangers of single vendor technology, as it is my day job at Opera trying to get sites to fix their code that break in Opera, wither through sniffing or giving broken code such as vendor specific extensions or not using it to spec. However in this case it isn’t like that as you already have 4 out of the 5 major browsers that support regular ttf and otf through @font-face, in an interoperable way. There is already a defacto standard that developers can use, and a growing number of fonts that are licensed to be used with @font-face, such as some of the beautiful fonts on The League of Moveable Type.

Implementation trumps specification.

That phrase cuts two ways. In the 1990s, Netscape and Microsoft implemented proprietary and incompatible scripting technologies, and supported HTML and CSS incompletely and often incorrectly. Our industry suffered because implementation “trumped” specification. We who remember those times are wary of corporate-driven free-for-alls.

On the other hand, if any of the reasonable type foundry web font proposals now out there gains sufficient momentum, it will solve our problem, will become a de facto standard temporarily, and will likely be submitted to the W3C to become an official spec. In that case, implementation will lead specification, and in a positive way.

If the industry fails to adopt a standard, then Typekit or something like it will become the means by which designers use real fonts on the web. (Even if the industry adopts a standard, Typekit could continue to be a useful aid to implementation.)