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:Great, but... (Score:4, Insightful)
Since they do it anyways, it sure wins having the text in an image, or worse, flash applet.
Re:How long... (Score:3, Insightful)
...before Microsoft embraces and extends this format?
I hope so, actually. So long as the core works on both and its open, I'll be happy. Web designers have been waiting for this for years, but its going nowhere without IE support.
Fix encoding first (Score:4, Insightful)
More Fonts for the Internet? (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh. Shit.
You know what else the Internet needs more of? Blink tags. In the right hands, fonts are marvelous tools for graphic design and aesthetics. In the hands of the average user or amateur web designer...shit. It's a good thing this is happening well into the Web 2.0 era. Can you imagine if this had been around in the days of Geocities.
Re:Great, but... (Score:4, Insightful)
As long as: (Score:3, Insightful)
As long as firefox gives me a way to ignore all this, I am fine with it.
Re:How long... (Score:3, Insightful)
You do not seem to understand what embrace+extend does. Once MS embraces+extends it and the sites generated with Visual Studio and FrontPage and those made by countless inept "web designers" in mom's basement and in corporate IT departments such that many sites do not work with any browser other than IE, the open standard is meaningless.
Re:Brillian idea (Score:3, Insightful)
Control over fonts has always been a limit with the web design
Yes, it sure is horrible when the users have some say over how content is presented to them. Those damn users should just sit down, shut up, and consume like good little drones!
I'd love to use cutting edge fonts [...]
I'd love to avoid sites you design at all costs! At least until I get a javascript-enabled version of lynx working. :)
Actually, I'm making a bit of an unfair judgment here. I'm presuming that you don't know how to design a site that gracefully degrades but still works properly when a user has a browser with missing or deliberately disabled features. But you know what they say: it's only 99.99% of web designers that make the rest look bad! :)
Re:Does anyone else long for the days... (Score:5, Insightful)
...when the web was more about content than fancy presentation?
No, you can't have your (ugly) static unstyled HTML back. Because the history of the web has shown that limiting technology presents no real limit to either bad presentation or awful information architecture. Web publishers who are doin' it wrong will continue to suck no matter how the medium evolves. It's the people with a clue, who create compelling new experiences, who are the ones I want to see empowered with new ways of doing things.
Re:Easier fonts means a lot! (Score:5, Insightful)
That's because according to many users, basic competence is "only for geeks and nerds." Many of them consider it a terribly unreasonable burden to expect them to read even the most basic step-by-step documentation which was intended for non-technical audiences because "they're not computer experts." 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."
Knowing this, do I feel sorry for them when they get screwed? No, I don't. It's unfortunate and I wish it didn't have to be that way, but I see no injustice in it. That's because they not only refuse to inform themselves but often actively resent even the implication that they could and should. This still goes on even after the widely publicised cases of identity theft and fraud that, if anything, the media tends to get sensationalistic about. It still goes on despite the vast wealth of freely available information out there which is accessible to anyone who can get to Google. At some point, water seeks its own level. The scammers are just attaching a higher price tag to something that didn't have an excuse in the first place.
Re:And how hard will it be to extract the entire f (Score:2, Insightful)
A couple of hours?
Now imagine a crazy world where you could just right-click on a copyrighted image and select 'save as'. How could images be useful in such a world? They couldn't, right?
Re:format does not matter, it's about download lim (Score:3, Insightful)
I believe it when I see it. It is trivial to convert a WOFF font back to Truetype or CFF. And most WOFF fonts probably won't be subsetted, so the foundries are essentially allowing their licensees to put their complete fonts on the web downloadable for everyone.
From the page I linked to in my previous post [edenspiekermann.com]: "For this reason FF Meta designer Erik Spiekermann, the FontFont Typeface Library – the world’s largest collection of original, contemporary typefaces –, and the FontShops endorse the WOFF specification, with default same-origin loading restrictions, as a Web font format. FontFont expects to license fonts for Web use in this format. ... We hope that besides the upcoming Mozilla Firefox 3.6 other browsers will join in implementing WOFF."
Compare it to watermarking in MP3: It does not protect against unauthorized copies, it can often be removed, so why would the music industry agree to something like that? Because it made copying a little bit harder, prosecution a little bit easier, while not pissing everybody of with some pain in the ass DRM scheme.
The foundries have a problem: they would love to make money on web typography, they are scared shitless because every web font technology out today is trivial to copy. You don't even have to copy it, just link from your CSS to a licensed font on another site, might even be legal.
On the other hand they watched other industries screwing it up by annoying their customers to hell and in the end driving a lot of potentially paying customers to discover ways to avoid being hassled by the industry. So they will not try to take invent another crazy DRM method just to get their asses kicked. WOFF might not be the solution they would like to see, but probably the best thing they can hope to realistically get, if they want to earn a dime from all those companies that would love to license fonts for the web to keep their CI consistent in all media.
Re:Does anyone else long for the days... (Score:3, Insightful)
On my last project at work, we had a requirement to create a number of pages in languages other than English. Some of them (such as Tigrinya [wikipedia.org]) use non-Latin character sets. Without a cross-browser way to provide or embed the appropriate font with/in the page, we had to rely on the user having the font installed on their PC (or the PC they happened to be accessing the site from).
Now in most cases that's probably true, as most people accessing those pages will be doing so because they speak that language, and so will presumably have the appropriate font. For everyone else, though, the page would look pretty crappy. (Check out the "weird boxes" on the Wikipedia page I link to)
That's one practical reason why, assuming making your content accessible to as wide an audience as possible is important to you.
Re:format does not matter, it's about download lim (Score:5, Insightful)
You haven't provided any reason that this font format is different than what we already have, and you're completely ignoring the SVG format which is actually a fully open standard, and is already supported if you properly support SVGs.
The point you didn't get: It doesn't matter.
The ONLY thing that matters is that the foundries accept WOFF, because they have the content that everybody wants to license. And if they puke on SVG, TrueType or OpenType, it wouldn't matter if these were the best formats the world has ever seen. The "new format" is more a psychological definition than a technological one. Yes, one can find a million reasons why this is stupid, unnecessary, nothing new, but it doesn't matter.
And for the (old and boring) argument against font use on the web: There IS no good typography on the web, because it cannot work due to lack of good fonts. So using the current state as an argument why WOFF is unnecessary is kind of short sighed, when the current situation is bad due to the lack of an established font solution accepted by the industry, which is exactly what WOFF is trying to change.
If you want to argue that typography is bad, please use print as your target, because this is where typography is put to good use. I write this on a display at 160DPI, the iPhone also has about 160DBI and the Nokia tablets have 240DPI. In a few years every screen will be indistinguishable from paper, all operating systems will be resolution independent and 20 years of lousy font support at 72DPI will be a fading memory of the past. The future of web typography will be much longer than its current past, so judge it on what it can do (and does on paper today), not based on failed implementations.
Re:Brillian idea (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, I'm making a bit of an unfair judgment here. I'm presuming that you don't know how to design a site that gracefully degrades but still works properly when a user has a browser with missing or deliberately disabled features. But you know what they say: it's only 99.99% of web designers that make the rest look bad! :)
This, a thousand times this. As much as I dislike the idea by itself, having certain control over fonts in the web isn't a bad thing by itself, it helps make it prettier and more readable when done correctly. The problems start, however, at the very point where the website stops working correctly because the user had the "arrogance" of replacing the font with his own, or the "nerve" to press Ctrl++ to try and make the text bigger.
The two most important words for anyone doing web design and/or development are degrade gracefully. They should be hammered into the skull of every new student, branded with fire on their arses, and giving out 100 pages of the phrase hand-written in cursive should be mandatory before graduation.
Use Silverlight to show an h264-encoded 1080p introductory video to visitors of your website if you want, write the entire menu in a client-side version of lolcode if you wish and use CSS features that won't be implemented by anyone before the year 2020 to make it prettier if you must, as long as you degrade gracefully and show something *useful* to people who don't have support for your dearest gizmo.
Seriously. Once desktop computers stop being the norm for web browsing, you and your boss will thank me for it.
Re:What about the foundries? (Score:3, Insightful)
Would you say that designing a font is more, or less work than the following examples:
Because if you'd say that font designing is "too hard for open source" then those must all be easier, since open source has successfully done all of them.
That said, I'm not so sure how much we *need* another font format. Especially given that OpenType is an ISO standard, and has been for years. Just because it was developed by Microsoft and Adobe, doesn't mean it's not worth considering.
This is to say nothing of momentum. Look at MP3 vs OOG. Look at raster graphics formats. You basically have GIF (antiquated) JPEG for photos and other applications where some compression lossyness is acceptable, and TIFF and PNG fragmenting the lossless raster market depending on application. Better formats are available. But the entrenched nature of the popular formats makes the up side vs the down side of using other formats a loosing proposition. Yes, you can design apps that will let a user choose between MP3 *or* OOG. or OpenType *or* WOFF But what's the incentive for content producers, really?
If there were a format that solves the raster graphics problem, and offered a unified solution that had the best of all worlds: The detail of TIFF, alpha channel support of PNG, was lossless like PNG and TIFF, compressed as small or smaller than JPEG, and had the animation support of GIF... I doubt it would be used much. Because those other formats dominate the market and it's very, very tough to "steer the Titanic" so to speak.
This new font format doesn't seem to set the world on fire with what it brings to the table. It will be relegated to the same place that OOG is: purists who will only use The Best(TM), and the open source faithful who use open source tools out of dogmatic devotion, regardless of quality.
This is just a tiny bit more bloat to add to the next upgrade cycle on all the major browsers.
Re:Does anyone else long for the days... (Score:3, Insightful)
Why? Because the web is about much more than sending words and bytes back and forth. It's about communication, of which there are many forms. Wanting to use a certain font to convey a certain message is valid. And of course you will always have the choice of whether or not you want to display those fonts, just like you can choose to disable javascript, images, and css if you really want to. And the choice of whether or not you want to visit sites that wish to exercise greater creative control over their medium will always be yours as well.
I don't understand the objects to this all over Slashdot. Do you really want to be staring at Verdana, Arial, and Times New Roman for the next 100 years?
Zapf Chancery is the devil's handwork. (Score:4, Insightful)
While I really, really want more typographic control in my layouts, the lack of talent and discretion among the great unwashed scares the bejeezus out of me. I foresee a future where surfing the web will be like reading email signatures, page after page...
Re:Easier fonts means a lot! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Easier fonts means a lot! (Score:3, Insightful)
What in GODS name are you blabbering about? No, seriously, what are you actually going on about? This is for WEB fonts, not for "Oh hey, i think i will completely misdirect you by somehow magically being capable of modifying your STATUS BAR with web font-faces!" These open fonts do absolutely NOTHING bad, people can already be redirected to websites without realising it, link obfuscation has been around since the web began.
Nobody gives a damn about the idiot users, especially the shops. The idiots are their largest incomes, "oh my computers not workin, best bin it and buy a new one". (yes, it happens every day)
Whoever modded this up seriously needs to read it back over again, the parents posts have absolutely NOTHING to do with this and is almost FUD-like.
A conversation about one aspect of computing can also touch on other aspects of computing. It's a natural, normal flow and only some kind of self-censorship designed to please the sensibilities of those like you would halt it. The fact that you went on to add your own commentary about computer shops and their source of income makes you something of a hypocrite in this instance, for you complain about the direction this thread took and then gave it more momentum in that direction. Further, you'll never see me censor myself in order to please you or anyone else, for you may always exercise your right to disregard any statements you dislike. That you chose not to use that right is your problem and yours alone.
None of this constitutes a claim that a standardized Web font is an inherently bad thing, or would do damage of any sort to anyone, which coincidentally is why you never saw me make such a claim. I thought I'd highlight the significance of that, as it seemed lost upon you.
Re:Lets you and him fight (Score:3, Insightful)
> ...we'll be stuck with boring typography for years.
We can only hope.
Re:How long... (Score:1, Insightful)
> 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.
And here as well.