I still remember how much crap I took at ESPN from validatorians when we decided to leave Netscape 4 — with its 1% marketshare — behind.

Actually, one member of The Web Standards Project (me) praised you to the skies for redesigning ESPN with web standards and promoted you and your work widely. Another member of The Web Standards Project claimed it was wrong to call the ESPN “standards-based” if it didn’t validate. Neither of us was speaking for the group. Most followers of The Web Standards Project got that you had done something important for standards-based design. If they didn’t get it at first, they surely got it when DWWS 1e came out, praising what you had done.

The WaSP never issued an official statement about your work, nor did anyone from webstandards.org, to my knowledge, criticize you for blocking Netscape 4 — something we had done (and A List Apart had done) years earlier.

I respect you so immensely for your achievements as a designer, publisher, and thinker. And your words mean so much to so many people who read you. I wish you stick to the facts and stop making The Web Standards Project a goat simply because you had an unpleasant email exchange with one member of The Project, who was speaking for himself.

Lieuwe: I don’t mean that Typekit itself will cost 0-100 bucks per domain… I mean that the license for the typeface will cost that much. With sIFR, you still have to pay for the *full* license for the typeface (rather than just a web-only license) so my hope is that Typekit will actually be *cheaper*, not more expensive than sIFR.

But if Typekit is going to cost $0-$100 per typeface, per domain, depending on the typeface, then it is $1-%100,- more expensive to use then sFIR, whilst both do the job with almost the same result for the visitor of a website.

In my honest opinion: However great the solution might be; if it will cost money, I do not see it taking of bigtime. Even if the solution only use CSS, was W3 supported and 100% browser compatible, since the costfree solutions are accepted as good enough by almost all the clients I know. I doubt if they want to pay for this almost perfect solution. But then again, if my predictions where always right, I would have been floating on an air mattress on my private island in the sun right now, wondering why the butler did not bring my drink yet.

It just reminds me of of all the umpteen DRM/anti-piracy technologies that were tried with CD’s, were easily circumvented and thus completely pointless inconveniences to honest customers. Even ‘easy’ DRM like Apple’s fairplay/iTunes ultimately seems to be giving way to DRM-less digital music.

Sooner or later one major foundry is going to wake up, EMI style and realise it can make more money selling customers what they want than putting pointless barriers up that degrade customer experience. But perhaps they just need to go through the process like the music companies did.

It’s possible a proper DRM system could be developed, but it’d need foundry support, OS vendor support (including Linux) and browser support. We’re talking 10-20 years at current rate of progress. In the mean time how much money are the foundries losing by not having DRM-less font licensing for the web today? How much have the lost over the last 10 years?

I’m tired of telling designers and customers “No, you can’t have any font you want” and I don’t see Typekit changing that.