![]() ![]() Start-ups have benefited from this typographic weak spot by becoming “facilitators” (paid go-betweens) between the Web designer, the text and the reader, offering to disseminate fonts (with CSS), but also protecting them and remunerating them for their use (bandwidth), with each page read being invoiced at the moment of the transmission of the typographic glyphs from their server. it was a tad too late, because the Web had also changed since the read/write utopia that postulated that every reader is potentially a writer. When, at long last, Web standards and browsers made it possible to associate, disseminate, load and activate fonts within them, by means of CSS style sheets, 6 6 The CSS2 recommendation of 1998 already offered this possibility, but it would be a long time before it became effective (late 2000s). ![]() 5 5 In 2004, Mike Davidson came up with the SiFR “solution” as a rather cunning compromise between usability and appearance. Everything is motivatived by the need to get around this complication: using the most widespread fonts, the Webfonts proposed by the Internet Explorer browser ( Verdana, Georgia) the font stack, a list of font requests in decreasing order of specificity the insertion of images that represent words (!) and even the recourse to Flash animations which reassemble the page, letter by letter, just as a typographic composer would do, without nevertheless distributing the font. The history of the Web is all about the slow graphic improvement of digital documents. Thus, the problem is both technical and legal. It is not possible to distribute them on a Web server without a special license. ![]() Digital fonts are likened to software packages, and subject to user licenses which, since the early days of desktop publishing (DTP), have been offering their purchasers an installation on a specific number of posts. Voir/See: It must be said that transmitting a document by computer is no simple feat due to the closed nature of the file formats and the fact that fonts are essential resources for the smooth working of the operating system. 4 4 The first website and one or two definitions are always accessible online. “galaxies,” but rather upon arrival, on the recipient’s screen, by means of a parser (which would later become a browser). See: They were not formatted at the outset, as in the Gutenberg and Marconi 3 3 Famous expressions used by Marshall McLuhan to describe the world of the printed document and the “broadcast” audio-visual world in: Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962). 2 2 Tim Berners-Lee, a British physicist, invented the Web at the CERN in 1989. The Web was invented to exchange digital documents, which were conceived as structured data. This problem is not just technical, and, in passing, has changed the very nature of typography, whose task has been to transmit meaning in writing since the mid-15 th century. This situation reveals a significant development in the Web’s history, and in the history of digital fonts, with their use subsequently becoming more reliant on a third party. 1 1 Michael Rundle, “Typekit Down: this is why the Web suddenly looks so ugly,” Wired (August 10, 2015). The breakdown of the Typekit Web platform in 2015, one of the major streaming services making it possible to download fonts onto Web pages, gave rise to a minor panic (known as the “Fontpocalypse”), by changing the look of(or “defacing” in the jargon) many websites. ![]()
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