Font Delusions
Last week I was reading Mark Pilgrim’s article, Fuck the Foundries, in which he refers to Zeldman’s interview with David Berlow on A List Apart. The impression I got from the both Mark’s article and the ALA interview was that David Berlow’s PERM table proposal was all about DRM, and after passing Mark’s article around the studio it kicked off a good old discussion over the potential downsides and merits of additional DRM in fonts, how @font-face embedding will affect the foundries, and so on. It was a good discussion; and whilst I’m passionately anti-DRM myself, I also like to think that I can see the other side of the argument as well.
Then yesterday I came across this article on the Font Bureau site, written by David Berlow himself. I had to read it a couple of times to convince myself that it wasn’t a joke. Then I had to get a couple of other people to read it as well, just to check that I wasn’t going mad.
As it turns out, the esteemed Mr Berlow wants to implement a ‘permissions table’ in fonts that goes way beyond basic DRM protection:
So the proposed table contains one entire section, more than half of its contents, for recommendations and linking to more educational materials, all information targeted at web developers.
WTF? So the font is going to contain material that will educate me as to it’s ‘correct use’? And this problem of the ‘misuse of fonts’ is only something that is a problem with web developers? One of his main worries appears to be about the use of ‘dangerous, blinking text’ – has he actually looked at the web in the last 5 years? Blinking text isn’t really the scourge of the internet right now.
There are plenty more gems of wisdom in the article, including:
Future web users will not want their browsers clogging the workings of their Operating Systems with fonts, nor the browsers presenting the users with web content that the user cannot read. In addition, web users do not want imprecisely or un-aesthetically presented content where a simple type-bearing graphic would suffice. Lastly, users do not want fonts to be able to give fraudulent users the unique corporate appearance of a genuine company.
Thanks for that David. But what they do want is font files swelled by including all sorts of arbitrary information on recommendations and education for web developers. Obviously.
This man is clearly deluded. The article is so condescending and downright offensive to web professionals (in fact, he doesn’t mention web designers at all – perhaps he thinks that they don’t exist – that everyone is just a developer?) that I can’t see how he thinks that publishing tosh like this is ever going to help his misguided proposal gain traction and become an established standard.
I’ve changed my mind. If David Berlow represents the other side of the argument, I don’t want to try and understand it anymore. I’m with Mark Pilgrim: If this is the best the foundries can come up with, if this is the way they want to frame the discussion, then fuck ‘em. We’ll do this our own way.