Web Fonts, Licensing and EOT
Over on the IEBlog, Bill Hill recently posted about Font Embedding on the Web. In it, he discusses how Microsoft has submitted it’s Embedded OpenType (EOT) file format to the W3C for standardization. This could be an important development for web typography, and here’s why.
The Kill Switch
So. The good news is that IE8 will be much, much better than anything before it. The bad news, Microsoft doesn’t dare release it and make it render existing websites, because there’s no way they’re going to render properly. Why? Because of the browser specific hacks put in to make the site render properly in IE6/7.
A “kill switch” is proposed, which will cause websites to render in the new or updated engine, whilst not breaking existing websites relying on IEs quirks.
Fair enough.
Browser Wars!
- Let browser vendors innovate as fast as they can
- With the end-goal of interoperability through standardization
- Increasing pressure on other vendors to interoperate, since there are actually four major vendors now, which are all important to most developers
And thereby a better world can be had.
Case in point: Incredibly useful features that used to be IE only, but are now being standardized and implemented by other vendors, such as XMLHTTPRequest, getBoundingClientRect, getClientRects, innerHTML, contentEditable and support for XML/XSLT. Uhm, that basically explains why Xopus is still very much IE oriented – despite all it’s grievances.
On Guilds and Certifications
Last month Peter-Paul Koch wrote about a Dutch Guild of Front-End Programmers he is starting. Its purpose is to further professionalise the front-end programming discipline within the Netherlands
and improve web design education. The primary means of doing this is by forming a certification body which will certify individual front-end programmers in the fields of HTML, CSS, JavaScript and possibly Flash. Clients can hire certified developers, which will then improve the quality of their websites.
I believe this is misguided.
