Commentary – unFocus Projects – Kevin Newman and Ken Newman

It’s been a while.

Kevin Newman — Wed, 15 May 2013 19:29:39 +0000

It’s a been a while since I posted. What’s up?

I’ve been working on a ton of stuff, and learning 10 new platforms it feels like. There’s a lot of excitement out there in both mobile development and HTML5 spaces. I’ve been deep diving into WordPress, learning CoffeeScript and TypeScript (I even started a Backbone.js implementation in TypeScript and called it CruddyMVC, but I didn’t get far, just the model, and I need to back port some ideas I implemented in a PHP/WordPress version of the same), node.js (even got my first bit of node.js code out in the wild just yesterday), and recently Xamarin, which looks like a great replacement for Flash and AIR for mobile apps (even without Playscript and Zynga’s AS3 language bindings, though those are pretty nice to have). I think I’ll even throw together a video sharing app using Xamarin, and a node.js server, cause that sounds like a great way to spend my nights and weekends. I might even dig back into unBrix (here’s the even less feature complete Android version). I have some ideas on how to keep the late game from getting boring, and it really could use some more features and, you know, levels.

I’ve got some fun things to post on WordPress dev (been doing a lot of WordPress and Backbone.js at work), and some tools I made like OnceForm (make sure to checkout the redux branch), that adcSTUDIO contributed to open source under GPL (I wrote a giant intro post for that a couple of weeks ago, but then Firefox crashed…).

Anywho, just wanted to post .. something. So here it is. I’ll try to post more often about some of this stuff, there’s a lot to talk about!

Adobe’s Flash/AIR Messaging Nightmare

Kevin Newman — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 22:45:13 +0000

Update: Mike Chambers posted an explanation and clarification on where Adobe is headed with Flash and AIR. Update 2: TechCrunch picks up (part of) the narrative.

I published an old post with my thoughts on the “Flash is Dead” thing that pops up routinely in media circles after anything happens to shake things up (like an Apple ban on Flash, or Adobe dropping a supported platform, etc.) yesterday. I optimistically highlighted in that piece the promise that AIR technology represents – it’s even in the title “Flash and AIR, Nothing But Opportunity“. I really believe the technology represents, and could fulfill all the promise those of us down in the weeds perceive. I also believe that Adobe’s Flash Platform engineers and evangelists also see that promise, and would like to see it fulfilled.

Yesterday Adobe unceremoniously dropped support for an entire class of platforms. No more Flash Player in mobile browsers. It’s not a terrible technical decision – working in AIR and native app land offers a ton more flexibility. It even makes business sense. Browser makers are increasingly hostile to Flash – Apple has never let it in the door on iOS (and never will), and Microsoft announced plans to kill off plugins even on the desktop in Windows 8 Metro interface. Browsers have become hostile territory for Flash, so it makes sense to move emphasis in the two directions the industry is headed – app store apps with AIR (which no one knows about) and HTML5 for browsers. In an important way, this does mean Flash is dead – it’s not going to be in the browser going forward. It really is out of Adobe’s control.

But there’s a problem. The longer Adobe’s bumbles the messaging, the harder it is to say for sure whether there is a lack of commitment to their platform (including AIR), or if it is truly just a PR problem. This kind of announcement had an easy to predict effect on Flash’s brand, yet there was no attempt to get out in front of that narrative that would show they are committed to the larger “Flash Platform” of which AIR is an important part going forward. In the non-technical parts of the industry – the media, managers, and creative side of production teams – they all heard Adobe Flash is out of mobile – use HTML5. It’s even worse in client land, where the term “HTML5 app” is used regularly along with “app store” – this news was so harmful to them, that clients with existing Flash content, which can be ported to the app space easily with AIR, are really freaking out. I can tell them about AIR all I want, but it’s hard for me to counteract all the media buzz (repetition is reality – brain science).

But what if they got the right message. This kind of move could represent a real intent on the part of Adobe’s leadership to get out of the Flash Platform altogether, and maybe out of the platform space entirely, and focus instead only on tooling to produce for the platform commons that HTML5 represents. Look at the kinds of decisions they’ve made recently. Adobe has essentially dropped internal support for their “Flash Platform” on every system platform they can, by either straight up dumping it (Linux, mobile flash, TV), or by farming out porting and support to partners like RIM.

On the other hand, Adobe and Flash evangelists and engineers seem committed to the “Flash Platform” which in an un-articulated narrative (narrative – it’s how we think – more brain science), really means AIR in app stores (mobile and desktop), but I’m not sure I’m getting the same message from the real decision makers at Adobe. I don’t know if it’s intent, or just plain old bad PR judgement, but it feels like I’m standing on the greasy platform, and it’s getting pretty tough to hold my balance. Some folks are already sliding off.

I think they are in it for the long haul, and they’ve even built some of their own apps on the little known Flash based mobile app technology that is AIR. But guessing someone’s intent is problematic – that only makes the PR problem clearer. I shouldn’t have to guess.

It boils down to this. I know technology, and I know the Flash Platform. I know it has merit and potential. But if people can’t tell if the decision makers at Adobe are serious about supporting it into the future, it’s going to be a tough haul to convince anyone to build anything on that platform. I already know a few platforms, including HTML, learning a new one isn’t scary, but I really prefer Flash and AIR because of it’s potential and even it’s legacy, which has value (despite the tar Steve Jobs dumped on it). If Adobe can’t or won’t make it clear that they are committed to AIR and the Flash Platform, I’ll have to find an alternative – and the decision won’t be mine. At this point, we need a clear unambiguous statement of intent from Adobe – are you committed to the Flash Platform and AIR, or not? A public roadmap wouldn’t hurt either.

Flash and AIR, Nothing But Opportunity

Kevin Newman — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 03:39:27 +0000

Preface: I wrote this one of the last few times the Flash is dead thing made the media rounds, because it seems as though many participants in the discussion are simply missing the bigger picture, that the market for rich interactive work is splitting between app store apps (native applications), and desktop browser-based apps (websites), and that those divisions are deep enough to require different development mindsets. The post is overly long – I don’t have an editor – but I figured I’d post it in its current draft state, since this keeps coming up, and so I don’t have to noodle with it anymore. So here it is. (Instant update: Lee Brimelow has said similar things in fewer words on his blog Update 2: Thibault Imbert chimes in. Update 3: Mike Chambers rolls the narrative. Now back to making awesome!).

In the technology business, if you aren’t looking ahead, you are being left behind. There is fundamental shift occurring in the content technology space, where Flash and HTML live their happy lives. This shift has mostly been explained using old terms, like “apps” and “HTML5 vs. Flash” – these explanations miss the point. They all describe how things were yesterday and are today, but miss how they will be tomorrow. The browser has been and is today, the primary means of application and content delivery. A new set of opportunities for delivering content are changing all that. The Split puts the traditional desktop browser market on one side, and app stores on new platforms, with new hardware, and new interface paradigms on the other.

App stores should be more broadly called content stores, because the line between apps and other kinds of content is pretty thin. Market specific content stores have been around for a while already on the desktop. Game shops like Steam and Direct2Drive already make up the lion’s share of the PC games market, and iTunes was already a form of an app store, before apps where apps.

The companies behind every platform are adopting apps stores, including all major operating systems on traditional PCs, including OSX, and soon Windows. Open source trail blazers like Ubuntu have actually had something like app stores for a long while now. Additionally, more and more types of content are being pulled into them, from apps, to music and movies, to Magazines and local newspapers. The models for monetization are so much clearer, and the tools to take advantage of the various models are already built, and for the consumer, very convenient. App stores are the new reality.

To really understand why this is happening, and what it means for those of us who make a living in the weeds, we need to understand where we are, and how we got here.

The PC Era

In the early days of personal computing, “applications” (or “programs”) were the hot action. You needed something to do with your new beige personal computer (PC), so you bought (or borrowed) software or other types of content on diskettes, and later CD-ROM (oh the magic) and installed that software to run on your PC or Mac. It was an offline process, but it was the only realistic way to go. Even if you had access to the internet, you weren’t going to download megabytes of data over your cutting edge 14.4KB fax/modem connection. Traditional forms of acquisition ruled in those days. You had to take yourself to the store, and buy a box or a publication or whatever else, to obtain content – probably paying with cash.

When the internet hit mainstream in the 90s, and data speeds increased, the transition from “applications” delivered through boxed diskettes, to continuously updated “websites” began. The internet had some advantages over boxed content. The biggest was that accessing a web site through the internet was exceedingly convenient for consumers. Far more convenient than traveling to the store and buying a box with a CD of clip art on it. For content producers there is also a sense of limitless shelf space compared with traditional retail outlets, so they were quick to try to carve out advantage there. Search engines and content indexing services like Google and Yahoo! made a killing on both ends by providing a way for content producers to get their content in front of users.

Broadband completed the transition. At the dawn of the new millennium and “the internet,” became the primary means of content and application delivery (aside from a few important smaller markets like games and productivity apps). The browser was the primary means of application and content delivery, and for good reason. The content is easy to access from multiple platforms, and is super convenient. All you need is an internet connection, and a browser.

A Flash of brilliance

At around the same time, Microsoft mostly won “the browser wars” with Internet Explorer 6, and basically stopped forward movement in their browser, and for many years, the internet – the commerce in the browser era’s “website” based economy was able to mature. The stagnant development of the dominant browser platform created a challenging environment, one in which it’s easy to see why Flash was able to thrive.

Flash brought many improvements over the browser, through constant performance and scriptability advancements, as well as significant additional features the browsers in the aggregate simply couldn’t match – video being an important notable feature. Additionally, Flash provided consistency across browsers and operating systems, and comparably great performance, when measured against HTML and JavaScript. A browser-based app simply couldn’t (still can’t) match it. Flash in the browser became the go to platform for serious interactive work on the internet. You just couldn’t get similar levels of awesome out of IE6 and the rest of the browsers of the time.

All good things

The split started to happen in 2006. On the PC, which really means in the PC browser, Adobe was getting more serious about the application space in the browser by releasing the first version of Flash with AVM2 (and s 3.0), a much more stable foundation than Actionscript 2.0 had been, along with an update to its application framework, Flex that took advantage of the improvements to Actionscript 3.0. This helped move trends in Flash’s direction, as seemingly every great site was build using the plugin technology. IE7 had come out that same year, but it only added to developers’ pain in the short-term, and it still wasn’t the robust interoperable platform that browser ecosystem needed to compete in the applications space. So in that space, movement continued toward Flash.

This could be considered the golden age for Flash. Flash ruled the content space during that time, in everything from banner ads, to browser-based games, to anything dealing with charts, and data (so-called RIAs), to just about all the video delivery on the internet.

Browsers didn’t come without problems. They have been slow to innovate, incompatible with one another – universally slow, buggy and crashy – and often full of horrible security holes (especially IE – the dominant player). They were mired in standards battles, forks, company and social politics (open source/EU fines) – but mostly, the leader – Microsoft with IE6, just held everything up. On top of all that, it was difficult for content producers, like traditional newspapers, to find revenue sources other than ad systems. The market was set for change.

That’s about when Apple fired the first warning shots across the bows of the PC browser fleet, by releasing the first iPhone, which could browse the internet, but didn’t run Flash. A brand new platform – software and hardware, with a brand new interface paradigm – touch, instead of mouse and keyboard. This would be a platform built from the lessons of the browser era, and it provided a wide open space for Apple to do what it does best. They rapidly iterated on their ecosystem, and came up with the overwhelmingly successful App Store, a system that seemingly everyone wanted in to. This was a system that came with multiple obvious revenue systems built right in – app sales, technology cross-licensing, advertising, etc. – all things that could be done in the browser space, but the app store made exceedingly convenient, to both producers and consumers. Apple catered to that demand masterfully, and over time expanded opportunities to include, in-app purchases, magazine publishing platforms, and subscriptions services, among others.

In the same way the internet – the modern PC era – had provided enough advantages over the previous content delivery systems to overshadow any of its shortcomings, the App Store model would provide enough promise to overshadow its possible shortcomings measured against its predecessor. App stores proved so compelling, and so big a threat to the existing browser-based models, it almost immediately ended a cozy relationship between Apple and Google, who ruled the browser era, as the gatekeeper to content, and the owner of essentially all advertising on the web. Google moved quickly to duplicate the app system for Android, and the other platform makers – WebOS, and Microsoft Windows Phone 7 Series – have been playing catch-up ever since. Eventually, Apple brought the app store system to the desktop in OSX Lion, and even Microsoft is picking it up in their Windows 8 Metro interface for full app store coverage in the traditional PC markets.

The rapidly evolving iPhone (later iOS) platform created new ways to think about a lot things. The most important new things were app and content delivery, and revenue sources through new monetization strategies. The Apple App Store changed everything.

The end of an era

When Apple released the iPad in April, 2010, Steve Jobs announced the “end of the PC era.” With the release of the iPad Apple did nothing less than complete and publish the rule book rewrite they began with the iPhone. More than anyone else, the folks at Apple seemed to understand that there is a divide between the “PC era” – which is really the “PC browser era” – and the new app store era. They understood that these two are on two different trajectories, and the app store era will supersede the browser. From now on, for better or for worse, applications would exist in App Stores, and websites would just be websites.

In the same month Apple announced the iPad, Steve Jobs followed up with a special letter in his open letter titled “Thoughts on Flash”, which highlighted some of the negatives of the browser-based “PC era,” where Flash was settling in as the dominant platform. The letter also exploited a division between the Flash crowd and the standards and open source crowds. And he directly addressed the “full web,” – Adobe’s tone-deaf name for “the PC era”. In that direct critique Jobs highlighted the disadvantages of the new app store model, by putting the “full web” flash apps in the “free” – or unprofitable box, and painting the technology with the old brush. Even the main part of the label “PC” is an old term, from a time that came before the modern browser era.

That letter was truly a brilliant piece of market positioning magic, but it was ultimately unnecessary, and Apple has since backed off. The app store model provides a marvelous promise without the need to degenerate the old browser based economy. Content makers, all of whom struggled to find revenue from websites, now have multiple new revenue streams to explore, through app sales, and licensing, and other kinds of content transactions within apps.

During the PC Era, browsers dominated users’ mind share, and time on the PC, native applications were still the clear leaders in performance, access to hardware, and close integration with the underlying OS platform. Despite that advantage, native apps were hamstrung by seemingly insurmountable inconvenience – the boxed distribution model – an inconvenience that most online distribution stores of the time simply duplicated (download, unzip setup, run setup, store setup file somewhere in case you lose your hard drive, etc.).

App stores solve these native application distribution problems by providing a central hub for content, simple e-commerce (no more credit card into the random unverified website), and can be integrated with the legacy system – the website.

My head hurts.

So what does this all mean for us, the front line Flash developers? It means opportunity. There are now three platforms to develop for!

Yeah, that’s right – three.

The transition to app stores on the desktop will take a while to roll out, and old habbits die hard, and Flash will stick around in that space for .. well, as long as that space exists. There are still a chunk of 98%+ of the user out there on the internet, still accessing the web through their existing PCs. That won’t change overnight. Even initiatives like Microsoft’s plugin blockade with Windows 8 and Metro mode take effect, they will come hand in hand with app stores, so there’s a workaround.

But let’s get real for a second, the Flash Player – in the browser – sits at the core of entire new lucrative markets on the PC, in the browser. Take browser era social gaming and Zynga – a game company, with a quirky social media, micro-transaction game library, integrated with Facebook’s social platform, is more profitable than top traditional PC game companies like E.A. Flash in the browser is having a grand time. Stage3d was just released, Unreal Engine was shown running on it at MAX. Flash is still tops for the best kinds of awesome on the internet.

Second, you have all the HTML5 opportunity – not directly relevant for Flash devs (yet), but for those of us that have had their hands in both worlds this whole time, this is exciting! HTML, JavaScript and CSS are finally getting to the point where you can build really awesome stuff with it. And, for app store monetization to work, discovery is key. Searchable HTML (and HTML5) will dominate for that. App stores are easy to search and easy to link into – from a website. Websites aren’t going anywhere – in every way, the app store model can’t work without the browser based internet.

And finally, the new kid on the block, the app store. For Flash devs, that means AIR – which is essentially Flash for app stores. If you have Flash (or even HTML) skills to burn, you can almost, just recompile your Flash app for AIR. Adobe has built this amazing tool – the best kept secret they didn’t mean to keep (don’t get me started on their PR). The sky is the start with AIR for Mobile, never mind the limit (Apollo indeed). The best part is, once you build for one app store with AIR, you can build for basically all of them, with very little additional effort.

Have a look at Machinarium. A traditionally packaged standalone desktop app, made with Flash, and distributed in a box through traditional outlets (and the specialty PC app stores, like Steam) with an online demo that runs in the desktop browser in Flash Player. Now republished for the Apple App Store with AIR and some optimizations, to run on iPad as a native app.

So where are we? Flash is alive and kicking – thriving even – despite the clueless ramblings of know-nothing media pundits and their bandwagon seeking behavior. You don’t need to listen to them, just get out there, and make cool apps/websites/games/whatever else with the same technology you’ve always used. These are exciting times.

What is a “Native” App?

Kevin Newman — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 17:39:14 +0000

I was recently asked my opinion on what makes a “native” app, and this was my response:

It depends on how you split that hair.

I think it depends on what platform level (hardware, OS, etc.) the particular user of the word native thinks that word applies to. It seems many use the word to refer to the actual bytecode and whether it matches the hardware (the CPU) – but in those cases I often see the term native used with the CPU architecture in the description – such as native ARM, or not native x86. iOS apps compiled with AIR 2.6 I’d say are compiled to native ARM bytecode.

There are other ways to parse it though – for example, it was pointed out to me that AIR for iOS apps are compiled from ABC bytecode into ARM bytecode to avoid the JIT (and Apple’s restrictions on the use of JIT), but that code still uses the virtual machine – the garbage collector, sandbox and whatnot. This gets right up to the edge of my understanding of virtual machines. But, if the use of a VM precludes an app from being called native then could .NET be native on Windows, or Dalvik apps on Android? In the case of .NET, there is even a JIT (pretty sure on that one, but not entirely so).

Then there’s the issue of targeted API (and ABI) – if an app is compiled to run on Windows, but is running in a VM on Linux, it’s probably not native (even though it’s CPU architecture probably matches), but if it runs in WINE on Linux, is that native?

Speaking of the Linux crowd – they parse their platforms even more granularity – Gnome apps, running on KDE are not native to some people, simply because they use a different GUI toolkit, though something running in an interpreted language like Python are native if they use the “native” GUI toolkit. Games are not subject to this line of reasoning – if it runs on Linux in OpenGL (without WINE) then it’s native.

I even remember reading some opinions in various places that programs not written in C are not native to Linux, and programs not written in C++ are not native to Windows – despite those programs using all the same APIs, ABIs, and not running a in VM.

So what is my opinion? As it relates to my current favorite target platform, I wouldn’t call an AIR app native – especially since it requires a 3rd party runtime to be installed separately (like on Android or desktops), and doesn’t have access to the native GUI toolkits and widgets and other OS APIs. That’s not a hard and fast opinion though, my definition of native is pretty malleable, and likely to change over time (or over the course of writing this response). I think I’d have a hard time selling the idea that a Java or AIR app is native to a client – on Android mostly because of the separate runtime requirement – and on all platforms, because of the lack of access to OS level APIs. It would feel disingenuous to call an AIR app a native app.

AIR for iOS comes closest to being reasonably called a native app – it is compiled as a complete standalone package, and runs pretty close to the metal (being compiled to ARM code) – and most importantly doesn’t require a third party runtime to be installed separately. If AIR for iOS apps had access to the native (underlying OS platform) GUI toolkit and other APIs, I would be more comfortable calling it native, though probably still wouldn’t.

Probably the best definition of “native” I could come up (which you still won’t get anywhere close to universal agreement on) is an app that comes out of using the platform maker’s tools to develop apps for the platform – XCode + Objective-C (and other supported languages) for OSX and iOS, Visual Studio for Windows and Windows Phone, Android SDK for Android – even using Adobe’s tools to make an AIR app makes it a “native” AIR app – where using HaXe may not count as native.

Generally though, as much as I could, I would try not to discuss whether or not an app development tool like AIR is native at all – especially since that term is so subjective. A project needs a particular problem solved, and if I can do that with AIR (on iOS that means it doesn’t require iOS GUI elements and conventions, or other features of iOS), then that’s what I’d recommend.

Update: AIR 3.0 closes this gap, and makes the “Native App” comparison easier because of two features; 1. Captive runtime – no more separate runtime requirement means it’s a standalone app. 2. Native Extensions – now an app has access to all the native functionality of the underlying platform. I’m comfortable calling an AIR app a Native App with AIR 3.0.

Frash shows Flash on iPhone can be Great (with Screenshots)

Kevin Newman — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 17:31:42 +0000

Warning: RANT ahead

Steve Jobs is full of crap. I could actually understand and respect a straightforward admission that the Flash Platform is a threat to Apple’s iOS business model – which is the real reason Jobs won’t let Flash on the iPhone and iPad. That’s not even a very good reason – the App Store has many compelling features on it’s own, even if Flash is in the browser, not the least of which is the easy to understand path to monitization. Performance is another issue – Flash is fast enough, faster than JS/Canvas by quite a bit, but it’s still not as fast as a native app and all it’s OpenGL goodness (among all the other great Apple APIs). Keeping Flash off iPhone (and especially CS5 iPhone apps) has nothing to do with performance, or compatibility. That’s just bunk! And nobody likes a liar.

/rant

Here are some screenshots to show how well many sites I’ve been involved with work in Flash on the iPhone (3GS using jailbreak and Frash).

A quit note on the technology: this is using Frash, which is a hack (a wrapper or compatibility layer) to get the Android version of Flash Player 10.1 running inside of iOS – it has not been optimized (or even completed at this point) to run well on iOS yet, and probably will never run as well as it can on Android. A recent test app I’ve been playing with runs 50% faster on a Droid Eris, vs. the iPhone 3GS – the Eris is slower hardware, running Android 2.1. It’s also crashy, and is missing features like streaming movie support (it does work with videos embedded in a swf) – and touch events are not quite as streamlined as they are on a real Android device (hover works better on Android for example, and hot spots are easier to hit). It’s also got all the quirks of the Wii and desktop Flash Player’s “noscale” feature (on Android there is a workaround that solves this, not implemented in Frash yet).

I just like to point that out, because some users are judging the viability of Flash on iOS/iPhone/iPad based on this hack (which is current at version 0.02), which is beyond silly.

For anyone interested, I followed these instructions to install it on my iPhone. Note: this uses SSH and dpkg to install. If you don’t know how to reverse that, you may want to find an apt repo and use Cydia to grab this, so you can uninstall Frash when you are done playing, as it can be quite unstable.

End of Life for IE6

Kenneth Newman — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 17:22:15 +0000

Internet Explorer 6 is approaching its end of life! I did a quick Google search and found an “End of Life” movement calling for developers to abandon support on December 31, 2009 or January 1, 2010, but according to the Internet Explorer’s “Lifecycle Supported Service Packs” , it looks like support officially expires on July 13, 2010. Notwithstanding the 7 1/2 month difference, I’m simply happy the the end is in sight! And then I read that IE6 is covered under XP SP3 and therefor supported until 2014…

The only way to kill Internet Explorer, is to simply stop supporting it as developers. I feel we owe it to the web in general to support the latest standard (official or defacto) and the latest browsers.

The Third Option for HTML Font Embedding

Kevin Newman — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 17:24:12 +0000

In the debate over whether web browser makers should implement .eot font support for Firefox in addition to their support for .ttf files (and .otf), their is an alternative that rarely gets any mention – SVG Glyphs in an html context. This is already supported by Opera 10, Safari 4, and Google Chrome (all prerelease at the time of this post). Using SVG Glyphs this way addresses a number of concerns, which are not often mentioned, or simply not well understood.

This gets sticky, but to understand the need for SVG glyphs you need to understand the debate around DRM. DRM doesn’t work. It’s such a failure, that Apple and others have completely abandoned it in their music formats, and game companies are starting to do the same. The reality is that if the crackers and pirates can get their hands on the material (like an encrypted music file), they are going to strip out the protection. So let’s write off DRM.

That’s not to say we should write off all forms of protection. Since we can’t stop the crackers, let’s concentrate on an area we can do something about, casual piracy. Consider a regular end user, who might view the source of a website, or checks their FireBug Net tab, and grab the font file to either install or use on their own system or website illegally. This is where SVG and EOT can play a role. EOT addresses both of these scenarios out of the box – it can be tied to a particular domain, so it cannot be easily installed on another website or blog, and it cannot be easily installed on an end user’s system folder, since it’s not a regular system font. By default, SVG addresses only one of these two problems – they can’t be installed on the user’s system, but they can be easily copied to another site. However, the EOT domain protection can be mimicked through the use of other web technologies. For example, you could serialize the SVG into a dataURL, and then further serialize that into some javascript (and even obfuscate and encrypt it if you wanted to), where you can do all the domain checks you want. This kind of protection is the ideal solution. It provides the maximum protection that DRM has ever been able to practically offer other – it makes it difficult for honest users to pirate fonts.

It is true that with enough googling, downloads and virus scans, the tools are available to extract something like an installable font from PDFs, SWFs, and even SVG files. For an end user to do that, they need a specific intent to steal the material, as well as a the technical capability to actually pull it off. Here we are back into pirate land, and those guys are more likely to hop on usenet, or bittorrent sites anyway – or their local file server at work, rather than attempt to extract some half version of a font from a PDF, EOT, SWF or SVG font (which tend to be subsetted). Dealing with them is a job for lawyers and the law, and it not a technical challenge. Fighting them on the wrong front will cost more than it nets, in terms of lost sales from not participating (and not making sales), or from the support headaches of dealing with ill-conceived DRM technology.

Having a font format that keeps the honest honest, is not too much for type designers to ask for. They spend a lot of time creating type faces, and frankly, they deserve some kind of protection from casual piracy – protection that is at least on par with the kinds of protection other forms of media are already receiving on the internet – and that even fonts are receiving in other formats, such as PDF and Flash SWF files.

Web browser makers, should implement EOT font support, the format supported by the 10,000 pound gorilla – Microsoft‘s Internet Explorer – which is huge, but they probably will not due mostly to a lack of interest from someone willing to do that work – and maybe other concerns. Since that is the case, SVG glyph fonts are great second choice. They provide all the protection that can be reasonably expected from an online media format, and starting over with a new font format is undesirable, if it means we have to wait for 10 more years to get any progress. The upshot is, it’s already in most of the current alternative browsers! Only Mozilla‘s Firefox has yet to implement SVG glyph support – they do seem ready to do it. The future of HTML font embedding is looking bright!

Update: I saw this earlier, but didn’t have the link handy. In bugzilla bug #119490 comment #15, John Daggett mentions that they plan to add this feature for Gecko 1.9.2. This is great news! It does mean more waiting though, as Gecho 1.9.2 is slotted to run whatever version of Firefox comes after the soon to be released 3.5 (3.6 at the moment).

No Embedded Web Fonts?

Kevin Newman — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 06:24:26 +0000

I occasionally come across an argument against the implementation of embedded web fonts in web browsers and I wanted to comment on it.

The argument is that embedding fonts in web pages should not be allowed, because either people don’t have the rights to use fonts that way, or because it’s too easy for users to steal the fonts, or some combination of the two. It’s debilitating for those who hold that position, and they may be missing out on a lot of potential opportunity. Craig Kroeger sells a set of fonts specifically for use in Adobe Flash, and even licensed them for distribution with Adobe Flash CS3. And that’s just for Flash designers. Imagine a market the size of the whole internet.

Without proper web font embedding technology, there are too many hurdles to uses custom type faces on your website. You can use Photoshop created text graphics, and there are some tools to help make using custom typography on the net easier, like sIFR (which relies on the Adobe Flash Player). While these are creative solutions, they are pretty restrictive – limiting the use of fonts to small blocks of text, like headers. They can also be time consuming to set up, and there is no way for web page designers to use these techniques for body copy. So other than some sparse use here and there, web designers don’t even consider using – or licensing – fonts for web sites, and instead stick with the same 10 fonts that most people have on their systems already.

Just as in print, or with photos or body copy, or any other licensable content, it’s on the shoulders of designers to make sure they are abiding by their license agreements. License templates exist that give designers the right to embed fonts in PDFs and other forms of distributable electronic document, and it’s generally well understood that the rights to images found on a web site belong to the owners that web site. When there are violations, friendly notices, or nasty-grams from the layers, seem to do the trick to get things resolved. These same principles undoubtedly apply to embedded fonts, and are no more complicated. Those are the solutions to possible abuse.

If we must though, I would suggest a move to a middle ground, and follow the example of the natural restrictions placed on photos. Since photos are reduced in quality and in size when converted to jpegs, re-use is impractical for high quality output. So browser producers could consider a special, difficult for end users to install font format for embedded web fonts, something based on SVG maybe. This would probably be a good idea for a number of reasons anyway, including smaller file sizes and better cross platform compatibility. Fonts could then be converted and subsetted for use in web pages, in the same way that they are converted and subsetted for use in other web distributable formats, like Adobe Flash, Director, PDF, and Silverlight.

I hope Opera CTO Håkon Wium Lie will stand by his publicly stated desire to see embedded web fonts come to Opera, and that something like that might be the catalyst that gets the other browser makers moving on embedded fonts.

I think the time has long passed for embedded web fonts.

Embedible web fonts and the rights counter argument

Kevin Newman — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 20:03:50 +0000

Gah! I’d like to apologize to anyone who received a ping of a very early draft version of this post, or had to suffer through that unfinished thought dump or any of the hurried revisions in between.

~~I’ll post the finished article in a little while.~~

I hit the publish button accidentally on my way to click the File menu in Windows Live Writer, and the thing published without warning. Time for a feature request – either warn before posting by default, or move the publish button to a less accident prone location.

Update: I posted the finished article.