Typophile - Apple says Web designers can post "any font" for use with Safari. - Comments

Webkit is the application

Ralf Herrmann — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 10:39:57 -0700

Webkit is the application framework which several browsers (including) Safari are build on. Safari versions can be a little behind the current Webkit versions. So it is a good idea to check if your bugs might already fixed in the lastest nightly build of Webkit. http://nightly.webkit.org/

I have no connection to Webkit, I am just VERY interested in webfonts. ;-)

Ralf, I wanted to write you

aszszelp — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 10:06:05 -0700

Ralf,

I wanted to write you directly anyway (in a different matter), so I will.
However let me ask, are you somehow involved in Webkit.

(—- the bug is not a rendering bug, so maybe it’s not Webkit, after all... (Webkit is the name of the _rendering_ engine, isn’t it?))

Szabolcs

Safari bugs are not really

Ralf Herrmann — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 09:56:10 -0700

Safari bugs are not really “Apple bugs”. A better place to report them is the Webkit page:
http://webkit.org/quality/reporting.html

What are the bugs?
(Can you send me an email if you don’t want to describe them here?)

Ralf

Good to know. As I have

aszszelp — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 09:22:57 -0700

Good to know.

As I have described above, this was the impression I got “from the outside”.
So, according to you, it’s worth getting into it. And I will, when I find the time (I like to do stuff either completely or not at all: no half jobs. This goes for bug reporting (being as specific, as possible, describing the problem with technical details, etc.).

Szabolcs

I think you’re reading too

sii — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 08:45:14 -0700

I think you’re reading too much into this.

Apple marketing used wording that some people in the font community objected to. They made the Apple font people aware of the issue. Apple changed the wording. End of story.

back to the original

innovati — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 08:37:23 -0700

back to the original topic:

Apple says you can use any font (obviously according to it’s licence) but I think they refer to any type of font.

I mean, if it only supported TTF fonts what good would that be. Still according to licences, but you still wouldn’t be able to use *any* font in that case, only a fraction of them.

Also like a photocopier, some photocopiers can only photocopy a small area, so a big one that says, “This photocopier can photocopy ANYTHING” doesn’t mean “You are encouraged and legally entitled to duplicate material you may not otherwise have licence to distrubute as long as you use this machine!”

Give apple a break, they could easily have made their own custom font format for safari fonts only, but they didn’t…

The bugreport system is open

guifa — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 06:35:17 -0700

The bugreport system is open to members of Apple Developer Connection, and they do make it clear that it’s free (I don’t think I’ve had any indication to the contrary), it’s designed for developers more than for end-users, because end users tend to not be able to describe in the clarity and detail that is necessary generally to diagnose problems.

They want registration for more serious natures so they can follow up. If they have a problem or a question they want a way to contact you and it integrates within their main bugtracking system for all software. I’m sure also WebKit has one as well. While I still have some bugs that have been left inattentive for 3 years, others have been rapidly fixed, and not necessarily in the order I would have thought (eg, easy things are unfixed, hard things get fixed). Partly it depends on how many people submit the same complaint.

«El futuro es una línea tan fina que apenas nos damos cuenta de pintarla nosotros mismos». (La Luz Oscura, por Javier Guerrero)

Thanks, Matthew, I just

aszszelp — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 00:44:25 -0700

Thanks, Matthew, I just could not find that site! (I noticed the bug report form built into Safari, but it was way to generic. Also, it was so impersonal, you could never know whether the mails incoming to the mailbox from that form are not redirected directly to /dev/null ;-) )

You know, that’s something I really disapprove of with Apple. Absolute intransparency. Also: even bugreport.apple.com is a) well hidden b) you need a registration (oh, the first option they offer you is 3000+ USD/year... of course, if you scroll down, you’ll find the 99USDp.a. for students, and at the very bottom, as if they did not want you to notice, the free “OnLine Membership”).

The stipulated aim of making everything as easy for the user as possible, “you don’t have to care about technical details” is good. It should be the primary task of good USER (oriented) interface design. However, it should not completely put the user under tutelage, if he _wants_ to care for technical details.

At least in the current situation it gave me the feeling, that bug reports are actually _not_welcome_. Or why else would you make it so hard to post improvement suggestions?

Let me have been mistaken. Let me find out, I was wrong!

Szabolcs

http://bugreport.apple.com

guifa — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 11:52:31 -0700

http://bugreport.apple.com is the preferred route especially if you have more technical details, but you can also go View->Customize Toolbar and activate the Report Bug button or (at least on a Mac), you can go to Safari->Report Bugs to Apple.

«El futuro es una línea tan fina que apenas nos damos cuenta de pintarla nosotros mismos». (La Luz Oscura, por Javier Guerrero)

Thanks, Si! (I’ll just

aszszelp — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 07:33:49 -0700

Thanks, Si!

(I’ll just have to find the time to put my observations together)

Szabolcs

You should be able to find

sii — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 06:30:05 -0700

You should be able to find contact info for Dave Hyatt online - he’s the Apple engineer responsible for Safari’s support for raw font downloads.

Actually, I found something

aszszelp — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 00:07:47 -0700

Actually, I found something concerning the implementation of @font-face in Safari which might be considered a bug. However, I have not found any page on the apple homepage to report Safari bugs. Any idea where and how to report?

Szabolcs

Excellent. Thanks for the

James Arboghast — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 23:18:19 -0700

Excellent. Thanks for the news Sii.

j a m e s

>Well done Si! >It might

sii — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 20:27:48 -0700

>Well done Si!

>It might have been related to our ongoing harassment of the good folks at Apple over the past two months.

Yep, I’m sure that various people have been nagging them - and it just took a while for the bureaucratic cogs to turn.

It might have been related

Thomas Phinney — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 20:22:36 -0700

It might have been related to our ongoing harassment of the good folks at Apple over the past two months.

Apple says Web designers can post "any font" for use with Safari.

sii — Mon, 7 Apr 2008 08:50:37 -0700

This came up at the Business of Type Event on Friday, and yes Apple font people were given a heads up...

...from the Fonts section of the main Safari page on Apple.com - http://www.apple.com/safari/

One of the biggest concerns around the Web fonts scheme is that Web designers would post commercial fonts through either ignorance or disregard of font licensing rights. Apple were aware of this (both Safari folks and Font folks) so I find it hard to understand why they’re telling web designers that they can post any font to the Web.

This is probably a break-down in communication between marketing folks and the font/browser folks, but the damage has been done – Mac World appears to have parroted the misinformation in their recent Safari review...

http://www.macworld.com/article/132708/2008/03/safari31.html

Hopefully Apple will fix this quickly, and post material that directs web designers to freeware fonts that can be used with the scheme.

Cheers, Si