On 06/05/2015 11:36 AM, Doug Ewell wrote:
At no point, however, did I suppose that a font with my alphabet, or any
of the jillions of others that have been invented "during a boring day
in class" (see Omniglot for tons of examples), should be silently
downloaded to a user's computer, consuming bandwidth and disk space,
without her knowledge. That's practically malware. Maybe I'm just not
enough of a Distinguished Visionary to understand how insanely great
this would be (unfortunately, celebrity name-dropping doesn't work with
me).
Unicode has stated consistently for at least 23 years that it would not
ever standardize PUA usage, and over the years some UTC members have
used terms like "strongly discouraged" and "not interoperable" even in
the presence of an agreement. Given this, and given that no system I'm
aware of magically downloads fonts for *regularly encoded characters* (I
still have no font for Arabic math symbols), I personally would not
expect Unicode to perform a 180 on this.\
Isn't this what webfonts are all about? You specify a font in the
stylesheet, give it a URL, and your browser goes and downloads it and
displays the text in it. That seems to me to be a perfectly reasonable
use of this sort of "evil font trick" in the PUA (and who knows, even in
encoded text? No, I can think of some Bad Things that could result).
There isn't anything to stop you from making a page with webfonts that
looks like it says one thing but when you copy/paste the text it's
something completely different. I should do that someday, just for
demonstration purposes...
~mark
