November 2007 Archives

Here are some initial results for my survey of Web designers/developers and their opinions on issues that relate to prospective technologies for Web fonts, as discussed in my last post.

Last year I posted about free fonts on the web, and briefly mentioned (in the penultimate paragraph) a new CSS-based approach to allow referencing of specific fonts on web servers from HTML web pages. This approach, promoted by CSS co-inventor and Opera CTO Häkon Lie, seems to be gaining momentum, with suport now coming in Safari via WebKit. My personal take on this is two-fold: for the actual end-users, folks designing/producing web pages, it is far too limited because 95%+ of all fonts can't legally be used in this way; for font vendors it's scary because it gives users a reason to make retail fonts publicly accessible on Web servers. In reponse to this, Microsoft has now offered to donate their old EOT web font embedding format to the W3C.

One thing that's been odd is that nobody has really asked typical Web designers/developers what they think of the different solutions for fonts on the Web, and how they'd do things in this brave new world. To try to correct that problem, I have created the following anonymous survey: Click Here to take the survey.

If you're a font vendor, I have a different survey here just for you.