by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2008/09/04 10:31 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2008/09/04/8924470.aspx
Over in the Microsoft VOLT Users Community, Pavanaja asked:
I heard that dynamic fonts -EOTs created by WEFT -don't work in IE8. Is that true?
Link - http://channel9.msdn.com/forums/Coffeehouse/397944-IE8-beta-and-WEFT/
-Pavanaja
[I posted this in WEFT Forum, but no one replied. Hence posting it here]
And colleague Sergey responded:
This thread is well outdated. EOT files did not work in new layout engine in IE8 Beta 1. But we just released Beta 2, which supports EOT fine.
Thanks,
Sergey
No font embedding is something I have covered before, like in that Rhymes with Amharic series.
Now the fix for the problem is very good news, obviously. :-)
Though there are always troubling aspects when stuff that was working stops doing so for any length of time.
The real problem is that neither the answer nor anything else gives insight into an actual RCA (root cause analysis) that would explain how/why it broke, in order to help understand the nature of the problem.
This insight can help guide trust (or mistrust!) in a technology in the future, so it can be a very powerful thing.
Lacking that understanding, one cannot do much more than guess wht is going on behind the scenes.
To be honest it is why most of the blogs I write are also blogs I would probably read were I not the author, since I try to bring some of those motivations into perspective when I know them.
I also like Blogs like that Engineering in Windows 7 one since they can give insights into the way problems are approached.-- and then with that knowledge and other clues you can assess the story beind the product, and whether/how much to trust it going forward.
Of course this gets back to that bug -- I have absolutely no insight whatsoever into the bug, how it was broken, how it was found, how hard the fix was, or the steps taken afterward to make sure the break couldn't happen again.
Without that information, how can I decide what it means for the technology? Shoudl I throw out the whole incident for insiufficient evidence, or should I treat it as a clue and take the fact that it was fixed, apparently not too long afetr it was reported, and move on?
Transparency. And Trust.
Getting insight into the people making such decisions can help one decide how to feel when one doesn't have all the information.
Now I trust Sergey, so in this case I do have some implicit trust based on that.
But I know that not everything is up to him every time. And I don't have nearly enough of a feeling about the IE team overall to know how this all fits.
Something to keep an eye on....
This blog brought to you by B (U+0042, aka LATIN CAPITAL LETTER B)
Dean Harding on 4 Sep 2008 7:18 PM:
For me, the clue is the phrase "new engine" -- presumably, something's been re-written and they just hadn't got around to re-implementing that particular feature in time for beta 1.
Given this whole blog post on font embedding on the ie blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2008/07/21/font-embedding-on-the-web.aspx) I'd say font embedding is a pretty important feature to the team.