1996 wasn't a horrible year. Mind you, it wasn't terribly amazing, but it wasn't awful. I'd been out of high school for a year, the Super Nintendo was still dominating my video game hobby, and Trainspotting was out in theaters.
For those of you that didn't see it, Trainspotting is the story of "A group of disaffected Scottish youths turn to heroin to escape the banalities of modern-day existence." (IMDb summary) It has a great bit involving a dead baby climbing on a ceiling and cranking its neck around to stare at one of the characters. It also has Ewan McGregor, albeit a strung-out-on-drugs version of him.
I can't help but feel that twelve years later, Microsoft is still escaping the banality of modern-day life with some sort of chemical aid. In 1996, both Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator introduced support for embedded fonts to their browsers, presenting the early form of the @font-face rule I spoke about last week. The problem was they each went a different route with it, so the whole modern web of awesome typography we were promised never happened. Netscape did one thing, and Microsoft decided to go with EOT fonts. The problem was that the EOT format was proprietary to Microsoft, and to convert fonts to the format you had to use their WEFT tool, which exists only on Windows.
Guess how many designers make use of Windows on a regular basis? I do, but according to the amount of Apple laptops at the last web-thingy conference I went to I'm in the minority.
We won't even go into how poor of a UI WEFT has. That's just icing on the cake.
Fast forward to 2008. Netscape Navigator has sunk to a peaceful oblivion beneath the waves of all dead software, and IE's market domination is slowly being chipped away by Firefox, Opera, and Safari (Too slowly, at that. Stop using IE, people!) After a large knockdown brawl with developers reacting very poorly to their plans for a new metatag, Microsoft decides that maybe they made a mistake and announces that they're going to embrace web standards. Honest. Really.
Well, maybe not. Like any junkie trying to kick the habit, Microsoft can't seem to drop its drug of choice (which is either being a total wanker or failing to embrace other people's standards, take your pick.) Last Monday, a mere four hours after my post about @font-face and my hopes that IE8 would embrace the W3C standards for the rule (which, as described by the CSS3 Web Fonts module currently includes the format() identifier and OpenType/TrueType support), Microsoft announced that they in fact were-- drumroll please-- encouraging others to embrace THEIR standard (which they've decided to open up), EOT.
Just to clarify, they're asking the rest of the industry to apply the brakes, make a u-turn, and join them in the direction they're going.
This is not, pardon me for saying so, "embracing Web Standardstm." Quite the opposite. Now, it's all and good for them to encourage people to use a standard that they've kept proprietary forever and are just now opening up, but we'll add some qualifiers on there. At the moment, the only way to convert to EOT is WEFT, a hard-to-use tool that exists only on Windows, generates non-compliant code, and was last updated in 2003.
I think Microsoft its well past time for an intervention. Obviously, despite their own declaration this very year, they can't just seem to kick the habit of pushing their own path on others instead of embracing what's already out there. Their bully tactics may have worked on PC software, but on the web it's been proven time and again that the more Microsoft moves in their own direction, the more they lose ground.
How much longer until IE starts seeing dead babies on the ceiling? Perhaps it's already started to happen. Consider if you will, the source code of the example page Microsoft gives in their post encouraging EOT use. It's a standards compliance nightmare. Never mind the fact that the post's author says the example site was designed to only be viewed in full screen mode at 1400 x 900 resolution... This is the person Microsoft chose to champion embracing their standard? Wow. I'm speechless.
My hopes for Internet Explorer 8 just dipped a bit.
