However I recently ran into another issue, which makes an argument against implementing @font-face. When implementing this on a news-site where we had an .otf licensed to us, it turned out that the IE-variations were trying to make the http call to the font and of course couldn’t, thereby slowing down performance for these browsers. Which made us decide to pull this feature.

The vast majority of all websites are still built by amateurs. The top websites have higher quality, and these websites will have extra flexibility in their designs while still taking the user experience into consideration.

I fear the impact on small online businesses the most.

Its true, that the freedom of font-choice will lead to many bad choices and many worse sites especially on the private/amateur level.

But i don’t agree with your overall negative verdict – i like to rather see the possibility of improvements on the higher/pro-level websites and especially my new possibilities as a professional web designer/developer.

Some counter-arguments:

a)”web designers are not great at typography”:
- at least where i work your “specialized labor” (very good concept indeed) wouldn’t really be comprimised. we already often enough get layout-screens from rather traditional designers (i.e. with typography-experience). they will be happy about the new options!

b)”we use fonts that experienced typographers have put together for us”
- uh, sort of. there is a grand total of like nine fonts/families of web-significance, half of which are good/ok to use for normal reading-text. those fonts were done by professionals but they are far from being “the definite best possible web-fonts”; we use them, because they are the only options period.

For creative Headings, very small Text or for example handwriting-type there is no choice at all.

the ability to finally make new usable web-fonts will certainly lead to many new and even free (think opensource programming) pro-level fonts for various uses.

c) licensing
This sadly is a problem. it exists, because the fonts once downloaded can’t be protected from other uses by the client.
the lone fact that millions will see it (on a website) shouldn’t be a problem however, since you also can produce and distribute infinite print-products, from your one pc-license without additional fees.

d) professional fonts will be cost-prohibitive
- if they will be similarly costed to font-licenses for print, i don’t see why (professional) web-designers couldn’t afford what print-designers have for ages.

also i expect the browsers to offer options like “no custom fonts” etc. so you can default to the usual webfonts if it gets all too bad.

Hope, i didn’t sound too harsh

Best Greetings,
Wolfgang