On May 11, 2010, at 9:26 AM, Ashley Sheridan wrote: > On Tue, 2010-05-11 at 16:14 +0200, Anne van Kesteren wrote: >> >> On Tue, 11 May 2010 16:08:01 +0200, Boris Zbarsky <bzbar...@mit.edu> wrote: >> > On 5/11/10 9:39 AM, Ashley Sheridan wrote: >> >> Is there really much of a need for this though? >> > >> > Good question. What _is_ the use case here, exactly? >> >> E.g. allowing the user to select a font in a text editing or drawing >> application. However, for portability it would probably be better if these >> were limited to fonts already on the Web. >> >> > > I agree, portability dictates that they should stick to the few common fonts, > or we end up with the same situation I've had countless times where someone > sent an MSWord file with all the bullets as some character from the Wingdings > font then wonder why people complain that all their bullets are letters. > > Embedding the font isn't feasible in this case because you really can't trust > the end-user to observe the legal aspects of the fonts they have on their > system. The designer of a font may not have given user rights to distribute > the font in a document that is publically available like this.
Well, my take is just the opposite. Portability should dictate only if the user wants portability. I don't believe we confine what colors can be picked based upon what is portable. People, users, authors, etc learn over time. We are seeing with HTML5 and all of its capabilities a real working platform for almost anything. I'm sure there will be ten times as many beasts created from it as beauties but I don't see that as a reason to constrain the possibilities. pedz
