RE: RE: New work on fonts at W3C

On Tue, 2009-06-23 at 16:12 +0000, Chris Wilson wrote:
> Dave Crossland wrote:

> >What do you personally think about Tom Lord's proposal?
> 
> Which?  "simple wrapper format...adds a place to put, 
> say, some human-friendly XHTML that conveys licensing 
> information...could also be used for images, audio files, 
> and so forth."?  It's an interesting idea, though I'd 
> caution providing COMPUTER-readable licensing information
> is more important right now (you can dump human-readable
> text in the copyright field in a font, but it doesn't help
> in determining allowed usage today; even most freeware fonts
> have a copyright.  Fonts are a more critical problem today, 
> in my mind - due to Pandora's box not being fully open yet, 
> and the aforementioned fonts-are-a-software-tool-unlike-images issue.


Please check out RDFa mark-up and ccREL ontology.  A human
friendly XHTML "About" attachment to a font file can contain
machine-readable license information.   People have worked for
years with W3C to bring that about.



> Trying to carry licensing information to instruct proper
> usage is like putting up signs saying whether the water
> is potable or not - it doesn't stop people from drinking
> it, but it does encourage doing the right thing.

Right.  And that is a generic, useful thing to do for 
all media types.  It is technically simpler to do it
for all media types in a general way.

-t

Received on Friday, 26 June 2009 00:31:52 UTC