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Embedded Open Type
[Dave Crossland]
Dave Crossland discusses EOT. He states seven reasons why it is wrong: - As noted above, all the details of the encryption and the compression that generate .eot files have been published already. So unscrupulous developers can write programs that can decrypt .eot files for use outside the browser, quickly defeating the object of the system.
- That means it is a solution looking for a problem. Whatever else EOT may do, it does not answer the fact that font software publishers may be losing money: it is already easy to break the terms of a font software license and give a copy to a friend. Dishonest people will use desktop fonts on the web anyway; honest people will not. Keeping honest users honest is unnecessary. EOT could lull font publishers and type designers into believing that there is a solution to the problem of unauthorised copying, and push their understanding of the facts further away from reality.
- It's a form of - that is, it attempts to enforce license conditions with software, rather than relying on people to determine and respect those conditions. The W3C have never encouraged this before, and it appears to be a precedent that some browser developers do not wish to see established.
- The compression system is patented by Monotype, who may only allow their patent to be used by web browsers. The WebKit and Gecko programs (which Apple Safari and Mozilla Firefox are based on) are licensed under the GNU LGPL meaning that they can't be limited to certain fields of use as this would imply.
- Some features are probably unnecessary. While ten years ago it was important to compress a large font, most people have faster Internet connections now; most mobile phone Internet access is faster than the 56k modem that was common in the late 1990s. Most Latin fonts are similar in size to a JPEG image file, so they do not need to be very highly compressed; the gzip compression already built in to web servers and browsers will do fine. If a font is subsetted, it cannot be used for dynamic content on wikis, blogs and news sites (when the text updates there will be missing letters!).
- Nobody likes it much. Recently a commentator suggested that there is no burning will within Microsoft to try to foist EOT onto the world. It gives browser authors and web designers a hard time by adding complexity to their tasks without benefiting them.
- Right now, you need a copy of Windows to run existing software that will encode a font as a .eot file. That software doesn't work very well.
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