![]() ![]() Font foundries could license their fonts for embedding and serve those fonts only to registered websites, using their own hosted system or via a trusted third party. The same approach can be applied to fonts. When you embed a Google map on your web page, you don’t download a bunch of map images from Google and stick them on your server, you link to Google which then serves up the maps to registered domains. And this is where the real opportunity lies. They can link to a font file on another server. Secondly, designers do not necessarily have to upload the font file to their own web server. The Web Fonts spec has always specified that “downloaded fonts should not be made available to other applications.” So the font exists only within the browser. Firstly, web font embedding doesn’t install the font on the operating system. Instead they should see this as an opportunity to be grabbed with both hands.īefore I explain how, let’s get a couple of facts straight. On that basis, it’s high time that font foundries and type designers stopped waving their hands in the air proclaiming the death of their industry, insisting that everyone will be pirating their fonts and installing them for free. This means, to me, that web fonts are not the future, they are the here-and-now, especially if your business is typefaces. The current state of affairs is that about 3% of browsers currently support web fonts (as I define them), a figure which is due to rise to about 30% probably later this year. It’s true that Microsoft is trying to get the W3C to make EOT a standard, but EOT is a form of DRM requiring pre-processing of regular fonts and as such is not acceptable to me, despite Bill Hill’s protestations (the condescending tone and content of which not unreasonably got the Joe Clark treatment). It’s true to say that Internet Explorer has supported web fonts since version 4, but only by way of EOT files which are currently proprietary. In terms of support, the current state of affairs is such that Safari 3.1 supports web fonts, it is scheduled for Firefox 3.1 and it is currently available in a development release of Opera. I mean using to point to regular TrueType or OpenType font files on a web server. Firstly, let me define web font embedding, or so-called web fonts, as I see it. ![]()
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