Thread

Safari Webkit now supports the CSS standard “font-face rules” for downloadable True Type fonts…
Good discussion in the comments to This Post
And here is the announcement on Surfin Safari, the Safari blog.

Downloadable font tech has been available in the past but all have been proprietary and didn’t use standard TrueType fonts. This is compliant with CSS web standards.

I imagine the first place we’ll see this is on sites targeting the iPhone/iPod-Touch as one is guaranteed to find Safari there.

Downloadable fonts is something I think most designers relish. Unfortunately, it will probably take some time for Firefox to implement this and almost forever for Microsoft-IE to adopt the standard…then years for users to adopt a compliant browser.

Nice to see Safari leading the pack in most web standards implementations…Acid2, fonts, etc.

Security and rights management really stand in the way here. Don’t get me wrong I’d like to see this going large-scale but, maybe I’m shooting my self in the foot?, I really don’t see it happening.

It is happening with Safari/Webkit. But yes, there are issues. Pretty good discussion of that in the comments to the link. One thought is the fonts are held in memory, not actually downloadable to the desktop. The same type of rights issues are involved in print where we are allowed to include fonts for the print job. And fonts are included in PDFs, just not extractable so something similar could work.

Oh, I realise it’s happening, I just don’t see it going anywhere that’s all.  Holding the font in memory still “downloads it to the desktop” so to speak, and it wouldn’t be long before a tool could be used to extract/intercept that data.

I could turn your argument about print work around - anyone who has access to the internet can download pirated videos, but not every video store employee sells pirated videos.

I’m going to bow out now as I could see this becoming a bit heated 😉

I could see this becoming a bit heated

Na. Not from me anyway.