>>Consider the literary equivalent... > >I don't think your analogy is all that great.
There is one thing I think is interesting and valuable about this analogy. In traditional publishing, it's incumbent on the publisher or author to marshal whatever fonts and other technologies are necessary to get his point across, and he would either eat the cost or licensing or using those technologies or (most of the time) build their costs into the cost of the content. The consumer (the reader) would pay once for the content and have everything he needed to read it (assuming, of course, that he spoke the language the content was in and wasn't visually impaired). In electronic publishing, at least on the Web, things seem to be changing so that much of the time it's incumbent on the READER, not the publisher, to line up the technologies necessary to read something and to pay whatever licensing fees are required. A publisher can get around this with PDF, but it's large and support for it isn't built into all Web browsers, or he can use SVG or one of the other embedded-font technologies, but they don't have terribly wide support, or he can simply pass the cost on to the consumer. I'm not sure whether we're witnessing a customer-unfriendly change in the business model (hardly the only one the computer industry has foisted on us) or merely a transitional period while technologies are still being developed. For my part, I'd like to see SVG fill this gap. The point is that while it shouldn't be Microsoft's job to solve everybody's problems, it also shouldn't be the average Joe's problem to solve them all himself. --Rich Gillam Language Analysis Systems, Inc.
