Good news for web designers: acceptable web-linked fonts are here

A rumbling debate on www-font, the W3C mailing list forum for discussion of how linked, downloadable fonts should be implemented, has been cut short by the action of commercial font publishers. At least one significant player is now issuing TTF fonts with web server licences, which is effectively an end-run around the discussion because it means that the dual-format (TTF/OTF and EOT) question now has an answer from the font software publishing world as well as implementations from the browser authors and publishers. These two groups held the power between them, with web designers and developers yapping and clamouring to more or less effect in the middle. Now the matter is resolved you can expect to be able to license TTF/OTF and EOT versions of many high-quality commercial fonts very, very soon. I’m not sure whether anybody lost out here, but I think commercial font publishers will fall over themselves to avoid being the last ones to make their libraries available.

Personally I am disappointed because I was hoping that the debate might move forward the concept of licence expression, where information about creator and publisher of linked items in a page (like video, photography, typefaces, etc) is available to the user through a machine-comprehendable format that is partially or completely wrapped around the media themselves. It would bring to the surface a load of people working in the second tier of the web: the designer and publisher of a typeface, the photographer who took the spectacular travel picture, the painter of a portrait and its licensor (typically a gallery, museum or private owner), the writer and producer of a video, etc as well as the people who design and code web sites. Such a system would play well to the idea of a semantic web. Tom Lord’s proposal, MAME, now seems likely to stay that way because, as clearly demonstrated in the font licensing discussion, nobody cares.

How it works

Here is a method that might be used to prevent TTF/OTF font files being ‘stolen’ (used outside the terms of the licence under which they have been provided) and hence could be acceptable to a commercial font software publisher:

• Server implements referer checking and denies the requested download if the check fails (making it hard for people to simply look for the URLs of the font files and download them by typing the URL into a browser)
• Font name table in the linked font file is made unintelligible by the publisher (the name table is critical for the font to be added to UI menus, caches etc on the operating system but, because all the info is replicated in the @font-face rules, browsers don’t need it)

Nowhere in any specification is the referer check or the obfuscation of the font file made mandatory; instead they are conditions of doing business with the font software publishers and you can always use permissively-licensed fonts instead if they meet your requirements.