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?

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?