tudy .ro – Tudor Damian

“In a world where the Web is the platform, having ten core Web fonts makes no sense.” – Jon Tan, jontangerine.com

Safari and Internet Explorer already support it, while Firefox and Opera will get it soon: downloadable webfonts!

Well, actually, Internet Explorer only has support for Embedded OpenType (EOT), while Safari 3.1 for Windows and Mac now fully supports the embedding of “sfnt fonts” (TrueType, OpenType PS, OpenType TT) using the @font-face declaration. As far as Firefox and Opera go, support for @font-face is scheduled for Firefox 3.1 to be released later this year. Opera had already a build with @font-face support, but it didn’t make it in the final release of 9.5. So it’s very likely to be in Opera 10. Now millions of web users will be able to view websites the way they were intended to be.

Technically the fonts are not embedded in the website, but they are simply linked like an image file. Thus the fonts need to be stored on a public server. Since you cannot upload commercial fonts to a public webserver, you are limited to freeware fonts. The embedding is done via CSS, following the W3C standard:

@font-face {
font-family: "GraublauWeb";
src: url(../fonts/GraublauWeb-Regular) format("truetype");
}

@font-face {
font-family: "GraublauWeb";
font-weight: bold;
src: url(../fonts/GraublauWeb-Bold) format("truetype");
}

Although font embedding is an awesome thing, there’s still a big (legal) problem. This quote from John Gruber sent to Typographica sums up the current dilemma: “The fonts you’re allowed to embed legally aren’t worth using; the fonts that are worth using aren’t embeddable.”

He is right, but this doesn’t always have to be the case. FDI fonts.info releases a set of high-quality web fonts supporting a wide range of character encodings. Graublau Sans Web regular and bold were designed by Georg Seifert. The fonts are optimized for screen use and support a wide range of character encodings, for example ISO 8859-15 (Western), ISO 8859-2 (Central European), ISO 8859-3 (Turkish, Maltese and Esperanto), ISO 8859-4 (Baltic), ISO 8859-5 (Cyrillic), ISO 8859-7 (Greek) and ISO 8859-10 (Scandinavian). Both fonts may be embedded in any website free of charge.

Here’s a demo page – make sure you use Safari 3.1! You can also visit this Webfonts.info Wiki page to find the download links some other fonts, and another demo to go with it. Don’t forget to check the license restrictions before using any of them.

Taken from WebProNews:

Here’s a head-scratcher with a deceptively obvious answer: When a person comments on a blog or website, who owns, or owns the rights to, that comment? Is it the commenter or the blog/website publisher? It’s a trickier question than you might think.

The intuitive answer, an opinion shared by some prominent bloggers, is that once a commenter comments, they submit the comment with the knowledge they’ve lost control of that comment forever. Of course, there’s more than one way to look at it, but there is also more than one platform (or publishing model) to consider, and at least a couple of legal aspects to explore.

A newspaper or magazine editor, for example, elects to publish response letters from readers. Not all responses are published, and thanks to some legal language, letter-writers are often informed they lose, to some extent, ownership of those letters.

In a sense, blog comments are similar. A blogger can elect not to publish a comment at all, or she can edit or delete a comment for various reasons. But there are stark differences, too. Most of the time, there is no written agreement about comments as there is with submitted letters. Another difference: Once a print publication publishes, the content can’t be unpublished. Along some (strong) lines of logic, though this hasn’t been fully tested in the legal system, this sense of permanency subjects print publishers to greater liability than digital publishers.

That, and the Communications Decency Act (so far) has protected bloggers from being liable for third party comments. Though they’ve tried, lawyers have had a tough time in court going after bloggers for something a commenter said. They have had more success in going after the commenter, if they can force identifying information from the blog host. This commenter liability would suggest a definite ownership of comments.

However, it could be argued also that a commenter no more owns his comment than a person quoted in an article “owns” his quote. (Quotation ownership, though, is perhaps a different animal altogether, and one that walks lines of ethics—or even attribution etiquette—more than legal ones.)

More, in the original article. Quite an interesting issue, nonetheless.