At the core: TV distributes information. A hand-cranked emergency radio is capable of receiving television audio transmissions. It would be counter-productive to prevent access to this content, even though it’s a fringe experience.
Yahoo will have to reconsider this analogy. (some more personal anecdotes)
A usefully comprehensive analysis of how @font-face affects web site loading time (both actual and perceived). The results are somewhat depressing.
Worst-case scenario: If a font file fails to download properly in Internet Explorer, the whole page is unviewable.
It sounds like rather than simply whacking external font requests into the stylesheet, a savvy web developer can improve circumstances by scripting the site to only load external fonts when page content requires it, and sending files compressed whenever possible. Microsoft-specific conditional clauses can help control its display problems. Some of Steve’s recommendations are of limited value to small-scale web developers.
Ascender Corp‘s website with legal information about embedding fonts in documents and devices. Oddly mum about embedding fonts in PDFs, a technology that’s been available for over a decade. Strongly endorses the EOT font format, although there’s no clear reason why this proprietary format has an advantage against piracy, aside from limiting use of the font to Internet Explorer. Useful information along with some mildly irritating shilling.
Their new design’s use of BPReplay is a good demonstration of a high-traffic site using @font-face. A happy coincidence as I continue looking for web font resources.
(Edit: And they unplugged it on day 2. BPRelay Bold was getting a lot of hate. In the comments there were some legitimate complaints about it not rendering well at smaller sizes (web fonts rarely have the same hinting advantages as native fonts) and consuming extra bandwidth to load.)
Another wiki for web fonts (see the Open Font Library), this features a short list of fonts sorted by licenses compatible with free end user access through @font-face. There is also aggregated news relevant to web fonts and aggregated Twitter feeds.
Resource for free and open-source font designs, mostly in TTF format. Intended to be both a resource for fonts and a mechanism for allowing font designers to redesign and remix each others’ work. Lack of readily accessible previews and a lot of broken pages currently limits usefulness. End-user will have to generate their own EOT files for use in @font-face stylesheet declarations.
Easily the best part of the site is the wiki, with detailed information on using the @font-face CSS declaration, with additional discussions on Microsoft’s EOT web font format and its problems, and links for more info.
Some of the better designs are also available through other resources, such as Font Squirrel.
Archive and server service for @font-face compatible fonts. Currently only invitation recipients can participate or even see what fonts are available. Typekit hosts all fonts, manages access to them, and vets font licensing (unlike Font Squirrel). Nominally free service provides use of one font and requires a promotional banner on your site; tiered fee services allow use of more fonts and access to non-free commercial fonts.
Some fonts available at the free level are common Linux-licensed fonts (DejaVu, Liberation, and Droid) available elsewhere without a linkback or external hosting, making the Typekit hosting agreement somewhat needless. Other fonts are provided only by Typekit and are better values (free or paid).
Archive of @font-face compatible fonts. Some have incomplete families, and others appear to be tracings from old Dover clipart books. Also worrisome that the licensing statement for some faces amounts to, “We have no idea if it’s legal to distribute this, but we don’t see anything to the contrary, and gosh darn it we’re not experts at this sort of thing, you know, so don’t blame us if this turns out to be pirated.” (Edit: And more than a couple fonts are incomplete; which might be good enough if you don’t need numerals or common punctuation but they can’t be relied on for arbitrary titling, such as in CMS-generated documents.)
All downloads are at no charge, include general-purpose OTF or TTF files, IE-compatible EOT files, and pregenerated stylesheet snippets.
I wasn’t planning on linking to anything involving SXSW this week since every going-on there will be blogged and tweeted to death without me, but I liked the premise of this: Three dev teams were tasked with producing a website to uniform design, content and technical specifications within 100 hours, each in a different CMS: Drupal, Joomla or WordPress. My friend Tom Boutell provides session notes (and better backgrounding than the Showdown site provides).
Ultimately, the result is not a proof of any platform’s superiority, but that there’s sufficient functional overlap of the low and high end CMSes to make specifying a platform a considerably less nervewracking experience than it was a couple years ago.
Incidentally, Tom just announced Context at SXSW today, a brand new CMS based on the Symfony framework.