Web Open Font Format Gets Backing From Mozilla 206
A new format specification has reached consensus among web and type designers and is being backed by Mozilla. Dubbed Web Open Font Format (WOFF), it is an effort to bring advanced typography to the Web in a much better way. Support for the new spec will be included as a part of Firefox 3.6 which just recently hit beta. "WOFF combines the work Leming and Blokland had done on embedding a variety of useful font metadata with the font resource compression that Kew had developed. The end result is a format that includes optimized compression that reduces the download time needed to load font resources while incorporating information about the font's origin and licensing. The format doesn't include any encryption or DRM, so it should be universally accepted by browser vendors — this should also qualify it for adoption by the W3C."
Re:Easier fonts means a lot! (Score:4, Informative)
format does not matter, it's about download limits (Score:5, Informative)
The interesting part of WOFF is not that it is a new font format. Actually it is mostly a wrapper around the OpenType format from Microsoft and Adobe with some goodies. The important part is that WOFF restricts where the font can be linked to. While e.g. a truetype font can be referenced from anywhere with CSS, a WOFF font has to be stored on the same site as the web page/css.
This might seem minor to you, but due to this restriction some of the large font foundries like fontfont and linotype will license their professional fonts for web use for the first time [edenspiekermann.com] (, probably because it would make prosecution of non licensed font use doable). This is actually big and will probably be an important step for typography on the web. I hope for the end of sFir, headlines as graphics and other bad ideas.
I think the format itself is not so much a technical and more a political achievement. It actually helps that it was derived from drafts from two typographers, not from some of the browser producers. The fact that it is a new format (so no copy problem baggage) and that it will provide some very light copy protection without having to implement DRM on the browser site probably helped getting the foundries on board. And you really need the foundries if you want typography to work, the current state of free fonts is just not good enough for most professional requirements.
Gecko, webkit and Opera already support OpenType, so adding the new format will be easy. Microsoft's IE supports crippled OpenType as eOT. The primary reason for crippling it was providing some light copy protection to get the foundries on board (which failed), so maybe even Microsoft will play along this time.
If this happens, we will not only see one font technology that is supported by all browsers for the first time, but will also be able to use thousands of professional fonts along with already usable free fonts to help browsers catch up with the increased readability and expressiveness print has had for hundreds of years due to the long time experience in typography.
Re:Easier fonts means a lot! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Easier fonts means a lot! (Score:4, Informative)
This is why we use browsers that aren't 10 years old. Heck, even firefox exposes this option in the GUI configuration. Go to Preferences, the Content tab, and click Advanced next to Enable Javascript.
Re:How long... (Score:3, Informative)
Keep waiting, because the users don't want this. I like my DejaVu Sans and prefer to read all my sites in the same readable font of my choice.
Re:Easier fonts means a lot! (Score:4, Informative)
There was an interview in Ray Gun magazine many years ago that was entirely set in Wingdings. David Carson (the art director for the magazine) talks about it briefly in the movie Helvetica.
What about the foundries? (Score:3, Informative)
Why is this even news? It's all well and good for a browser vendor to endorse a font format, but it's absolutely useless if no foundries will release fonts in this format. As I found out the hard way, designing a good font is difficult, and best left to experts. Being able to make our own "open" fonts is a nice idea in theory, but in practice, it's more useful to be able to buy or commission fonts from professional designers.
Re:Easier fonts means a lot! (Score:3, Informative)
Link addresses appear in the toolbar, which fonts specified in a webpage (whether or not they are embedded in the page) don't affect. The only thing fonts in the page would affect is the presentation of the link text, which the page owner controls from the outset, and can already make as misleading as they want.
Re:How long... (Score:4, Informative)
Then find the checkbox next to "Disable web fonts" and tick it. It's probably near "Disable images" and "Disable styles".
The rest of us will enjoy the improvement.
Re:Easier fonts means a lot! (Score:1, Informative)
> They don't seem to appreciate the difference between "don't trust every anonymous individual who asks for your bank account information" and "write this complex program in x86 assembly," which is not unlike the difference between "drive this car" and "rebuild its engine."
Actually writing a complex program in x86 assembly is more like "rebuild its engine using no other tools than a banana and a nail clipper".
Re:Sure, but only with proprietary plugins... (Score:2, Informative)
sIFR is really only intended for replacing header text, not body text. It's an easy, cross-browser compatible, gracefully degrading way to use non-standard fonts for headers or embellishment. It's more flexible and requires less implementation time than replacing those same header items with PNGs. It also doesn't interfere with search engine indexing, and the text can still be selected/copied normally. Not a bad solution, in my mind. At least until something better (like a web open font format) comes along.
Re:Great, but... (Score:3, Informative)
Text in images [...] can consume a lot of bandwidth relative to text.
Relative to text, yes. Relative to downloading an entire font? Hmm.
Arial.ttf is 756 KB on my machine. Arial Unicode MS is over 22 MB.
Re:They should have named it (Score:2, Informative)
I was thinking about Web Typography & Fonts (WTF) :)
Re:How long... (Score:1, Informative)
> Keep waiting, because the users don't want this. I like my DejaVu Sans and
> prefer to read all my sites in the same readable font of my choice.
Same here.
And here.
And here.
Re:How long... (Score:2, Informative)
Subsetting out unused scripts (Score:3, Informative)
Relative to downloading an entire font? Hmm.
Arial.ttf is 756 KB on my machine. Arial Unicode MS is over 22 MB.
Ideally, your web site revision system has a character whitelist that covers the language(s) that you use on the site, so that people who post comments can't use bidirectional override characters to break the layout. Your fonts could be subsetted to use all the glyphs used by characters in the whitelist and no others. For example, if your site is available only in English, you can drop kana, CJK ideographs, Hangul syllables, Cyrillic, Arabic, Hebrew, Syriac, the various Brahmic scripts, etc.