In response, browser manufacturers will probably have to set the default to *not* download fonts, meaning that 80% of the population who don’t know how, or aren’t willing, to change their browser settings won’t leaving you in the same situation you’re in now.

And that leaves aside the issue of licencing fonts. How much do you think it would take to get a redistributable licence for a TTF font from, say, Adobe?

And, look, I can get a whole bunch of fonts for free simply by looking at the source of HTML pages and finding the download links in the CSS files.

Cheers
Ken

The standard actually specifies that the fonts should only be available to the browser (though I guess that’s really a matter of implementation). The standard doesn’t specify the format so perhaps intellectual property issues could be resolved using some sort of encrypted format along the lines of what’s being developed for music files?

But as one of my old bosses used to say “if it was easy, everyone would be doing it” :)

If I actually needed to do this for a real project, I’d probably write a small script that generated the heading images and then included them in the webpages with an img tag with an alt property. This’d solve the copyright issues, but what I really don’t like about this approach (apart from issues of flexibility and maintenance) is that it takes some of the meaning out of your markup. To most of the people viewing webpages through a normal browser it makes absolutely no difference whether your headings are graphics or actual text, but what if they aren’t viewing your document through a normal browser or what if the user isn’t actually a person?

The classic example of this is searchability. Using a H1 tag rather than an image helps google figure out what my page is about, but what worries me more is the fact that we don’t know what’s going to happen in the future. Maybe next year my website will need to be accessible to people using the browser software on their mobile phones. Maybe in the next 10 years people will be doing things with webpages in ways that we can’t even imagine right now. I want my websites to continue being useful for as long as possible without needing to recreate them from scratch everytime something changes.

One of the things I’ve learnt from doing web development is that using non-standard hacks makes things harder to maintain. It’s inevitable that things will change but trying to develop standard compliant documents that contain information about what things are rather than how they should look makes the upgrade path easier, particularly if you want to try to automate it.

So ends my rant (at the inperfect universe I’m forced to operate in, rather than you :)). That said, I think one of the things that makes web development and technology so interesting is that accomodating competing concerns can lead to interesting solutions to problems. I think the flash heading widget is a good example of that. I guess it’s like the endless debates about programming languages, there are no “right” answers, it all depends what you want to do and what you’re willing to sacrafice.

in text, rather than having to resort to images. As you say, it’s all about tradeoffs (like so many other things in IT)