Broken Record
July 19th, 2009
I’ve written about narrow windows of opportunity before. Font makers have enjoyed quite a wide window of opportunity, thanks to the limitations of consumer grade PCs from the 80s and 90s.
The business models in play today just don’t make sense. I mean, the font makers call themselves “foundries”. That is ridiculous. They don’t make metal letter forms. They design fonts, so we should call them font designers. We shouldn’t legislate or standardize a fee structure designed for metal. Font designers also got a break from the Web, since fonts were a pain to download over modems. Today, the technology to allow any font on a web page is close to ready. There’s a little stutter sometimes (in all browsers supporting this capability), as the default font is replaced by a fancier one. Unless your computer has it cached.
That caching bit is pretty key. Loading fonts is time consuming. That’s why your operating system stores them in one place. The Web will be no different. Fighting about font rights on origin servers is a backwards line of argument. Web authors will converge on a caching scheme to share fonts across web sites. I wouldn’t start a business attempting to act as a font broker, either.
July 19th, 2009 at 10:40 pm
The nature of copyright and fonts has to have these guys terrified. You *cannot* copyright a font. You *can* copyright the digital representation thereof, but in theory a bit-perfect copy is an equivalent representation of the same uncopyrightable entity.
Good times for the IP lawyers (of which I am not one…IANAL, etc.)
July 20th, 2009 at 1:54 am
There’s such an initiative, it’s called Typekit. It protects the authors rights (by obfucsating the sources, for example), but it makes web fonts a real thing!
http://typekit.com/ (still in beta, so closed for the general public)
There’s a nice article about Typekit on For Am Beautiful Web: http://forabeautifulweb.com/blog/about/first_impressions_of_typekit/
July 20th, 2009 at 11:16 am
After fruitlessly fighting the same origin restriction that ff imposes to create a test case that uses web fonts as a bugzilla test case and seeing that the same test case works like a charm in Safari I am very skeptical that we are doing the right thing. Hopefully Safari’s more liberal approach will win.
July 20th, 2009 at 1:03 pm
Bugzilla is a pretty weird special case: a server you upload content to but don’t control, but which makes a new domain for almost every upload.
July 20th, 2009 at 1:05 pm
So far the pushback from Web developers on the same-origin restrictions for fonts has been almost nil. Compare with the pushback around same-origin restrictions for video, which was massive (and we backed down).
July 20th, 2009 at 1:45 pm
[...] I love journalism, and music, and I’m a total font geek but I just can’t stand newspapers, record labels, and these god forsaken font “foundries”. [...]
July 20th, 2009 at 4:10 pm
That’s good data. But, you know, I wouldn’t want my business model to be countered with Go away or I will replace you with a very simple caching proxy