I read this with interest as well as your List Apart article and other posts. Given that you wrote this over 18 months ago I wonder whether you think the situation has improved at all?

In the course of researching an article I’ve been looking at the various web font offerings and hosting services currently available and it strikes me that while some type vendors’ attitudes to web fonts range from mildy indifferent to cynical, there’s some cause for hope.

All things being equal, I’d prefer to pay a one-off fee for a font that I can ‘hold in my hand’ digitally speaking and use without onerous restrictions. Having said that, attempting to understand what some EULAs do and don’t allow is headache-inducing and, 18 months on, it looks to me like Fontspring is leading the way, but no one else seems all that keen to follow.

I wonder if Web font hosting might yet prove to be workable? When I compare, say, the price of the 9-font OpenType Frutiger family from Adobe with an annual subscription to Typekit, with access to the full library, no restrictions on websites and a 500,000 monthly pageview limit the latter doesn’t look like such a bad deal. It looks even better if you get your fonts from Linotype.
Of course there are all of the caveats, and when someone else has control of your fonts you never know what surprises the future might hold, but if I passed up Frutiger I could pay for a four year subscription to Typekit and have change left over. If web font hosting services can get the pricing, licensing and delivery right, might they not be the future of type on the Web?

I’d be interested in including your views in my feature if you have the time or inclination to respond.

Thanks for confirming that I’m not nuts. Already knew that, but the font design community is so used to talking amongst themselves and reinforcing their own notions about how things are going to be, that I’ve become the bearer of ill tidings, destroyer of worlds, simply because my fictional colleague Webmail tells it like it is.
I don’t normally like to add commercial sites to the blogroll here at Readable Web if I can help it. But I’m going to be adding a link to Font Squirrel. No site has done more.
Regards, rich

Browsers handle font size like shit if you ask me. I’m with you there. The font/size zoom features in every one of them make no sense. On that, I have some researcher-like things to say that I’m working on. BTW – your first post riled me – not because of the @font-face stuff – but because it reminded me of how much I’ve got on the back-burner that I need to get out the door. It’s been a bad year for my family health-wise and it’s taken a toll on me.

With CSS, there’s one glaring omission which affects @font-face greatly: Whereas I can create a “font stack” that tells the browser which font-family name to fallback to if the one “on top” of it in the stack is unavailable, there’s no elegant way to also swap the size. In other words, selecting a fallback font-family is easy, but getting the metrics to match up somewhat with the font it’s replacing is a nightmare.
And then there’s the problem of physical screen size. Had a quick conversation with Keven Larson about this. We’ve had “plug and play” technology for how long now? Why the frack doesn’t the display announce it’s physical size to the OS? Handy to know that, right? Kevlar said something to the effect that display manufacturers have just been sloppy and ignorant about it so far but that MS was working with them to get more useful info.
Who was it that said, “We work in dark. We give what we can.”? Well, we’re still in the dark for sure.
I find the stuff being done with font features exciting, but there are nuts and bolts issues regarding font sizing and rendering that have still not been adequately addressed. Not by a long shot. I’m sure that’s got your vote, too.
As far as starting the wrecking ball, like I said, CSS is like a mountain, it won’t wreck, but you can add to the pile and do some drilling into it.
Some things might forever require a programmatic workaround.
Gotta run, but soon I’m going to be writing a post about this: The people who make browsers – and that includes the standards bodies and other think tanks like the W3C – are, at least in field of publishing, the most important people in the world right now. They have enormous power. It just fell into their hands. The decisions they are making today will affect the world long after you and I are dead. And so, they need to be watched and niggled and cajoled by people on the outside of the circle, because we can see things that they, from their vantage point cannot see. I have a specific example in mind.
But later. And I’ll be sending you an email.

rich