Having had a quick look around, what Safari has implemented is font-linking, not font-embedding, and the font foundries really don't like that, because the font can then be easily pirated.
Of course, that may not be an issue if you stick with free fonts, but it's easy to foresee a lot of people sticking fonts up on web servers willy-nilly without regard to proper licensing.
I imagine there will be quite a lot of pressure from the font industry for browsers to implement Microsoft's technology in preference to font-linking, and really there's no reason for them not to since Microsoft have opened the EOT specification up and are putting it forward as a W3C standard.
An indicator that the foundries are taking this seriously is that suddenly Ascender seem to be actively developing their own support for EOT, though as yet it's pretty limited (see their Font Embedding site).
I have to say I think Microsoft have the moral high ground on this occasion (though perhaps less so in the past, when EOT was still closed).
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Of course, that may not be an issue if you stick with free fonts, but it's easy to foresee a lot of people sticking fonts up on web servers willy-nilly without regard to proper licensing.
I imagine there will be quite a lot of pressure from the font industry for browsers to implement Microsoft's technology in preference to font-linking, and really there's no reason for them not to since Microsoft have opened the EOT specification up and are putting it forward as a W3C standard.
An indicator that the foundries are taking this seriously is that suddenly Ascender seem to be actively developing their own support for EOT, though as yet it's pretty limited (see their Font Embedding site).
I have to say I think Microsoft have the moral high ground on this occasion (though perhaps less so in the past, when EOT was still closed).