Microsoft's forgotten monopoly

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Embedding and serving

As J.M. Galvin notes, Microsoft implemented a web font embedding technology in the late '90s, around the same time as they rolled out OpenType. It is still supported in Internet Explorer, and is called WEFT (Web Embeddable Font Technology). Microsoft Typography provides a free WEFT tool that examines your web pages and builds subsetted .eot (Embeddable OpenType) files for the fonts in use. The .eot files are not large, so I don't think connection speeds were as big an issue as J.M Galvin suggests. Around the same time as MS developed WEFT and started supporting it in IE, Netscape rolled out support for TrueDoc web font technology from Bitstream. So there were two competing web font formats, supported in different browsers, neither of them terribly attractive to users even individually let alone in non-compatible competition. So web fonts became one of the stalemates of the browser wars, and while I'm wary of some of Mr Lie's ideas and don't think he sufficiently understands the font business, I'm actually grateful to him for restarting discussion of this subject. It has been dormant for too long. It is important not to repeat the mistakes of the WEFT and TrueDoc attempts though, and I think what we learned that time around was that web fonts must be a standard, because the technology will only be embraced if it has reliable multi-browser support.

In reference to your question regarding the embedding bit and web fonts, Patrick, I think from the font foundries' perspective there is a qualitative difference between embedding a font in a document, typically for limited distribution, often within a single company -- the context in which the original TrueType embedding bit was first used -- and serving a font over the Internet. While the embedding bits may be used in this new context to provide some protection, I have seen font companies become increasingly restrictive in their embedding permissions (and in their user licenses) as the diversity and distribution of electronic documents has grown. So, ironically, I think we are in a situation where the old embedding bits are not providing the level of security that font developers would like to see in web fonts, while at the same time they are being used to restrict the kind of permissions users would like to have. It is a lose-lose situation.

Some of my colleagues, have drafted schemes for more extensive and flexible digital rights management for fonts, which would not only provide better protection for fonts but would also make it much easier for licensees to, e.g. purchase additional and specific rights to match how they intend to use the fonts. These evolving schemes have been presented at ATypI TypeTech forums and Linotype Typotechnica events, but so far the audience has been largely other font developers, many of whom are supportive of the ideas, and there has been no buy-in from the major software developers such as Microsoft and Adobe, although they have given feedback.

The OpenType format specification v1.4 is now becoming part of the mpeg-4 standard, so I see some hope for addressing font DRM through standards channels as part of a web font solution. That is a long process, I think, but I don't see a better way to a robust solution that benefits all parties.

Posted by: John Hudson   Posted on: 06/22/06 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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