@font-face: Solution or bandage?
Yesterday I wrote a post at Mindfly describing how to make use of the CSS @font-face rule for embedding fonts into web pages. I figured it was timely, as I’m getting tired of the number of times I have to use an image (or putz around with workarounds like sIFR) to substitute a special header all because of a non-web safe font, or a client with very specific typographic tastes and a very poor understanding of how the web and fonts work together (or more to the point, how they don’t). Furthermore, both Firefox and Opera have intentions to add support to the feature very soon, creating a world where all four major browsers will have the function (although with IE using EOT and not TTF it won’t be all peace and happiness quite yet).
The thing is, the more I look into the topic, the more it appears that @font-face won’t going to be ushering in a Utopian society of pretty fonts. The core issue seems to be how legal is font embedding going to be, and how will typographers feel about developers putting their font files on servers in a place where they could potentially be snatched?
So far the answers seem to be ‘not very’ and ‘not good’, respectively.
Which makes me wonder, what good, if any, will @font-face actually serve us. If, as a solution, it creates only another problem, a legal problem, that standards themselves can’t fix, is it worth the effort investing into this path to web fonts? Perhaps browser people should be looking into another technique that’ll prove to be more secure for the font files. Something that won’t look good on paper but results in a lot of angry mail from lawyers.
Although, it does make me wonder. Is there a technique that could be used with the current @font-face rule that would still protect the fonts?
@font-face. Good? Bad?
Maybe the legal issues could be seen positively as a vehicle to speed up the development of new free/libre Fonts on the web, and to spread them across the web. I should be rather glad, to be able to use Linux Libertine or flavours of free Sans faces in my projects rather than have a bad taste in my mouth after saying “Trebuchet MS” too often (which is paradoxal to be considered “exotic” anyways).
I agree that it does present an opportunity for free fonts to see more use, and I totally encourage that. I gather, though, that many designers have certain non-free fonts that they wish to make use of on a semi-regular basis, and the legal limitations on those might hamper their willingness to adopt the rule in common use. That said, I don’t think Microsoft’s recent announcement that they’re sticking to EOT fonts instead of embracing the existing standards is the right solution, mind you, it would just be nice if there was a way to have our cake and eat it too, like some sort of secure embedding method that also happened to be actual web standards.