Microsoft: Font Format Bullies?
On Monday I made a post over on the Mindfly blog about the travesty that is Microsoft continuing to go their own way when it comes to web standards. In particular, it appears that rather than following the standards in the CSS3 Web Fonts Module in IE8, they’re instead going to continue to push forward with EOT, their proprietary embedded font format that they’re just now beginning to open up.
And surprise, they’re expecting the rest of the Internet to follow their lead.
I’m not going to repeat in detail the rant I made on the Mindfly blog, but I can’t help but feel that despite security issues related to font embedding that Microsoft is going about things the wrong way. Does font embedding need to be secure so font makers aren’t screwed? Yes. Does Microsoft need to decide for the rest of the world what that method is? No! Whatever happened to embracing standards?
I’m curious about other people’s views on the subject. Is Microsoft’s version of @font-face (and it’s insistence upon EOT fonts) a better path than the W3C’s version of @font-face (as currently seen in Safari)? Is security a good excuse to ignore standards?