
The “font” Top-Level Media Type - vishal1188
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc8081
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wimagguc
My biggest issue with fonts is the licenses. It takes a law department to
understand all the usage constraints and distribution rights for each set, and
then you'll have to figure out whom to pay and how much. (Sure, it's nice to
have better tech around using fonts in browser, but I don't think that's the
biggest bottle neck for most use cases.)

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floatboth
Many excellent fonts are under SIL Open Font License (OFL), you don't have to
pay anyone.

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Zekio
This seems like something that should have been done long ago

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Jaruzel
Alas, with so many emerging 'standards' across the web now, maintaining
relevant RFCs seems to have fallen by the wayside.

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detaro
In the other direction, some people have gotten sick of working on standards
that don't lead to anything (often because they are created in a vacuum,
before actual deployment). Getting the balance between "standardize before
everyone is doing completely different things" and "don't standardize before
you know what the solution should look like" right is tricky. Especially in
the web space, there are tons of fairly theoretical (parts of) standards that
nevertheless cost the participants a lot of energy.

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richardwhiuk
The problem is that technology on the web increasingly goes through an
inflection point.

Prior to the inflection it is too early to standardize, because it's not clear
that how something will actually work, or whether it'll actually be use.

Post inflection point, there is an established way of doing things (by sheer
weight of running code), so standardization often offers little benefit.

During the inflection point, those involved are generally way too busy to
worry about standardization!

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mstade
Also post inflection point, if standardization happens it often becomes a
matter of just documenting de facto standards – warts and all. This can make
bugs not just a curiosity of the standard but hard requirements, and a
difficult corner to paint yourself out of.

Case in point: HTML. (And in particular the WHATWG living standard.)

Counter case: HTTP. Through my rose tinted glasses I think it's a beautiful
after-the-fact standardization effort. It's not without warts of course,
nothing is, but still a great example of carefully turning the state of the
world into a solid standard.

