Fonts & Encodings

10.4. Conclusion

Here we are at the end of this chapter devoted to the management and use of fonts on the Web. We can see that the Web is the victim of its own success: faced with the explosion in the number of users (and the size of the market that they represent), organizations and companies have produced in record time a vast range of tools and standards. But there is always something amiss: the tools are compatible with so few browsers that incompatibility is more the rule than the exception. The standards, as beautiful and powerful as they may be, exist on paper only, in the vast majority of cases. Even worse, the multinational corporations control the lion's share: it is Microsoft that reigns supreme in the downloading of fonts, at least until GlyphGate comes to be more widely used—as it deserves to be; and Adobe has a near monopoly on tools for SVG.

Let us not deceive ourselves: the true problem is neither technology nor the complexity of the world's writing systems. The problem is copyright. The fact that a font belongs to the foundry that distributes it and that that foundry grants to only one person at a time the right to use it stands in flagrant contradiction to the principles of the Web, where all resources (text, images, sound, animations) are freely available to everyone. That is why Bitstream, Microsoft, and em2 Solutions are bending over backwards to provide fonts to web users—without actually providing them. That is the reason for which the best intentions of ...