[whatwg] Need document.available_fonts() call

[João Eiras]

On Tue, 11 May 2010 16:26:43 +0200, Ashley Sheridan  
<ash at ashleysheridan.co.uk> 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 <bzbarsky at 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.
>

I've suggested this back in 2007
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-webapi/2007Jul/0021.html

Regarding filtering which fonts, do note that a web page is not the only  
place where web standards and APIs are used.


-- 

João Eiras
Core Developer, Opera Software ASA, http://www.opera.com/