Recently in web fonts Category

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.

I'll get that second half of the font protection discussion up soon. But it's been forever since I posted - the Macromedia merger has been a huge time sink, and my other work just hasn't gone away, so blog posting was the thing I could most afford to put off.

Anyway, an interesting discussion was generated by this rather goofy manifesto, both on the original site, and here on Typophile. Basically, somebody wants to be able to use more fonts in HTML, and has some confusion about how best to accomplish that - he thinks the type foundries are to blame for the current lack of options, and suggests that fonts need to be liberated from their servitude to their type foundry masters.

My response, which is somewhere in both those lengthy threads, I reproduce again here: