From: Language Analysis Systems, Inc. Unicode list reader (Unicode-mail@las-inc.com)
Date: Tue Dec 02 2003 - 14:21:18 EST
>>Consider the literary equivalent...
>
>I don't think your analogy is all that great.
There is one thing I think is interesting and valuable about this
analogy. In traditional publishing, it's incumbent on the publisher or
author to marshal whatever fonts and other technologies are necessary to
get his point across, and he would either eat the cost or licensing or
using those technologies or (most of the time) build their costs into
the cost of the content. The consumer (the reader) would pay once for
the content and have everything he needed to read it (assuming, of
course, that he spoke the language the content was in and wasn't
visually impaired).
In electronic publishing, at least on the Web, things seem to be
changing so that much of the time it's incumbent on the READER, not the
publisher, to line up the technologies necessary to read something and
to pay whatever licensing fees are required. A publisher can get around
this with PDF, but it's large and support for it isn't built into all
Web browsers, or he can use SVG or one of the other embedded-font
technologies, but they don't have terribly wide support, or he can
simply pass the cost on to the consumer.
I'm not sure whether we're witnessing a customer-unfriendly change in
the business model (hardly the only one the computer industry has
foisted on us) or merely a transitional period while technologies are
still being developed. For my part, I'd like to see SVG fill this gap.
The point is that while it shouldn't be Microsoft's job to solve
everybody's problems, it also shouldn't be the average Joe's problem to
solve them all himself.
--Rich Gillam
Language Analysis Systems, Inc.
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