41 Thanks

Its only a matter of time.

posted at 12:47 am on August 29, 2007 by Jamie McCue

42 I think it's a great Idea

The fact is that bad designers can use any font they so choose anyway, through images. How is it any worse to use web fonts instead? They’ll just keep doing the same thing, but they will at the very least chuck the images, one would hope. For those of us who are good designers, it simply means that we will have richer websites, and no limits on our creativity. It seems to me that some people are trying to make the point that we should prevent advancement and growth in the industry because of how it MIGHT be misused. Suppose that same line of thinking had prevented image or flash use? Both have their place, yet can both be mis- or over-used, and the case is the same with fonts.

posted at 12:54 am on August 29, 2007 by Carissa Miller

43 A step forward - definitely

I have been waiting (that too very eagerly) for something like this for quiet sometime. And thought TTF is not my first choice (I would like something along the line of FreeType)…
I also disagree (and that too very storngly) with anyone who thinks that this will add to the mess on the net.
I see their point, but those “phases” usually are a part of the learning curve. I mean sure people will use wrong fonts and things will look ugly and myspacy but that already happens on print – and just beacuase people are not using the technology right doesn’t mean that the technology should not be developed! I mean, are we going to stop selling knives because people misuse it?!!

Power to the people… :)

posted at 03:19 am on August 29, 2007 by G Sinha

44 Yea, We're Discussing Fonts Here...

Part of me dreads to possibility of ugly fonts taking over the Web, and I foresee something that may look as badly as what you see on MySpace.com after newbies get their hands on HTML for the first time.

One solution I like (but haven’t used myself yet) is with Sifr (www.mikeindustries.com/sifr/)— when used subtly. It seems to work well enough, but not for browsers without Flash installed (including my iPhone!). Of course, there won’t be ONE solution to this but many.

posted at 04:23 am on August 29, 2007 by Kevin Davison

45 Dynamically creating headings

Thanks for the interesting article. An alternative way to make heading images is to use a control to dynamically create them from a custom font which is installed on your machine.

Our tech guy wrote an article about this and put it on the Code Project website:
http://www.codeproject.com/useritems/Dynamic_Headings.asp

Please note – we do not advocate using images for headings but when there is no way around it this sure beats creating them manually!

posted at 05:46 am on August 29, 2007 by Rebecca Byrne

46 One UTF-8 font styled with CSS and rendered with S

Hi HÃ¥kon!

Thank you for a wonderful article! I wonder if you could comment on the technical feasibility of the following idea. I believe some version of this has been discussed before, so it is not a new idea as far as I know, but to someone like me it seems to be a good idea, and it would be interesting to know your thoughts on this. Anyway, the idea is to require the user to have ANY UTF-8 font available on their system and let CSS tell the browers SVG-renderer to draw a font that looks like Times, Helvetica or whatever. If this is possible, the user only needs ONE font installed and browsers styles it into whatever the designer wants it to look like. If the browser has seen this styling before it could cache it to render faster the next time round. Is this a horrible idea?

posted at 11:25 am on August 29, 2007 by Haakon Meland Eriksen

47 Security Issues?

As I said earlier, I like HÃ¥kon’s idea. But it might make web surfing a bit less safe, as the browser gets to handle binary files – and I suppose rendering text from a font happens deeper in the system than rendering an image. I’m not a security expert, so maybe somebody here can say something more competent about that.

posted at 12:01 pm on August 29, 2007 by Herbert Braun

48 Legality & Legability

Working for a large company that uses many, many, many overly expensive paid for fonts this would be a legal nightmare.
The idea of sticking what is essentially a link within some css to the a font that we paid hundreds of pounds for and which is covered by copyright would be as much business suicide as for instance sticking a chart mp3 on the home page of the companies site.

Then there’s the general MySpace syndrome that seems to have vomited its way on to the internet (previously GeoCities syndrome)which has shown us that the current allowance for quite a large range of typesets can be abused and misused to create horrors beyond the minds imagination.

With the current state of web-design and all the features, standards and methods available for creating better web-pages this seems too much like pandering to pointless aesthetics and to me appears more of a step in the wrong direction then anything else.
It’s bad enough being expected to read comic sans surrounded by clip-art on naff business sites without having the horrors of users choosing obscure grunge fonts for body text.

This is one idea that people need to step back from, walk away and have a damned good think about.

posted at 02:23 pm on August 29, 2007 by Chris McKee

49 CTOs, Web ⊃ Print, CD, Font Registry

(Disclosure: I’m on the board of YesLogic, the company behind Prince. Being on the board is a neat way of pushing for your favorite features to be implemented.)

It’s fascinating that being on the board of a corporation seems to be a more powerful position in technical regards than being CTO of another one.

Some commenters stress the point that “Web is not print� and fonts therefore had a lesser importance there. Although that phrase is true in so far that Web is not equal to print, Web is also print. Furthermore, CSS is not limited to the Web.

There are thousands of (expensive) corporate design manuals calling for certain fonts (that are not provided with Windows), some corporations even have custom typefaces made for exclusive use. Why would they want their homepage to differ from the rest of their publications? After all, they do put style-final, CI-compatible PDFs online instead of HTML+CSS. Sure, they could lose exclusiveness if font files were freely available, but right now, on the Web, they don’t have it to lose it.

Fonts are different from images in terms of numbers, variation and ease of creation. They are similar in file size, but fonts can be reused much more often. Therefore browsers should probably cache fonts longer. Some implementers may choose to cache them separately anyway, in an encrypted format to hinder user access and thereby doing their part of basic DRM, which would be completely useless of course, because the download location is visible to anyone with even the slightest knowledge of CSS. Any useful protection of intellectual (i.e. artistic) creations would have to include the transmission layer. Microsoft mostly failed with its proprietary format (Embedded Open Type, EOT), although it is in use for scripts with limited default support by browsers and operating systems (e.g. in India). There is something to learn from EOT’s flaws, but I’m not sure to which solution this should lead us. Maybe the best solution was a central font (file) registry which keeps track of licenses and download locations (and thereby copyright infringements); it would be queried by browsers automatically to verify the legality of a webfont and to get a key if the font server also implements download restrictions.

posted at 02:54 pm on August 29, 2007 by Christoph Päper

50 Untitled

Let’s shut down the internet. Some people will (and even do) use it to spread child porn, terroristic propaganda and other evils.

There’s still the responsibility of the designer, developer and content manager to make/keep things beautiful, usable, accessible and legal. That’s the same as it is now. There will only be more opportunities, which can be used to make it both better or worse.

@Chris McKnee: your company will not be forced to use these fonts on their website.
And during the next styleguide update your company can ask the designer to add a web styleguide as well, using open source fonts. Maybe these are not the same as the ones used in the styleguide for print, but there’ll be probably one or two that match better than those that you currently use on your website.

posted at 03:04 pm on August 29, 2007 by Sander Aarts