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Web Open Font Format Gets Backing From Mozilla
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."
For example, just imagine a world where every website can easily implement Comic Sans, even if the end user has uninstalled the font.
I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
...before Microsoft embraces and extends this format?
It's great that we're getting an open for fonts. However, I'm worried that using this, in the future various websites will push users to view their website in their own cool font and be optimised for them. This could break the web's font-agnosticism.
Then it'll be accurate to describe the content of all major web sites as a bunch of WOFFLE.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Control over fonts has always been a limit with the web design and I believe this could help overcome it, creating an important improvement for the web. I'm interested in understanding how web browsers will handle font updates across operating systems, whether or not fonts will be added system wide or just for the browser, and perhaps just for the user. I'd love to use cutting edge fonts like urban fonts (http://www.urbanfonts.com) without having to turn them into GIFs before including in web content.
Open Standards Portal
...until hell freezes over?
I'd be much happier if sites would just get their fscking 'charset' tags set properly. I suppose now we can look forward to smart-quotes mis-encoded in a whole variety of site-specific fonts!
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
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.
So if this is the future...where's my jet pack?
...when the web was more about content than fancy presentation?
I mean, how many people really need to use fancy fonts to read a web forum, read a news article, or buy an item from a store?
It's a nice idea if universal buy-in could be obtained, but ... why? :-)
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
As long as firefox gives me a way to ignore all this, I am fine with it.
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 (, 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.
memomo: free web based language trainer DE-EN-ES-FR-IT
There was never a time when the web truly content rich. It was all content, but very poor and very incomplete, and then it morphed into today's web somewhat seamlessly with both fluff and content coming on line in parallel. I'm just glad the developers have gotten over full page flash for the most part. There was a time 3-4 years ago when entire, major corporate sites (Bath & Body Works comes to mind) were protected by flash-only portals. No flash, no entry.
This would be a fabulous idea if the web were limited to accomplished graphic designers, but it's not - and that's where the problem comes in. There are a lot of people out there who just don't have the ability to create a readable site, even if they have otherwise good content. This just gives them another way to present their useful information poorly.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
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.
And if HTML 5 video happens, we will not only see one video technology that is supported by all browsers for the first time, but will also be able to provide content available on any platform and avoid the proprietary nature of Adobe Flash. .NET applet for displaying custom fonts sometime in the near future. W3C and such are nice, but as long as the Big Guys (TM) think they get to set the standard, we'll never see real change. (And sorry if that last bit sounded like a 2008 campaign speech.)
Oh, wait...
It'll be nice to see this being adopted in the open browsers, but I wouldn't bet the house on Microsoft (and to a lesser degree, Apple) implementing this anytime soon. If history is any indication, we'd be more likely to see MSFT release a
Funny may not give karma, but +5 Informative never made anyone snort coffee out their nose.
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.
Courier. I like to pretend I'm reading a typewriter printout.
Sent from my PDP-11
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
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.
As we've seen with Flash applets and such, site-locking will primarily result in diverting users from File|Save As... to the several hundred free and for-profit sites/utilities which will pop up to solve this problem. Just look at the large number of YouTube video downloaders, Flash hacks, JavaScript de-obfuscators and PDF liberators.
If something like this open but restricted font distribution scheme is to succeed, it has to learn from the postscript/pdf experience, in which simple "do not copy or embed" flags are useless if the applications do not check or enforce them. Fonts embedded in PDFs are only marginally protected insofar as the PDF only stores the subset of characters actually used in the document, and even then, there are several OSS utilities to extract fonts form PDFs. The web situation is even worse in that with user-generated content, an average debugger/game cheater app, or the source code to Firefox, it would be pretty trivial to mount a dictionary attack to obtain the data for an entire font, its weights, and variants.
This scheme will only be viable if the server does some of the interpreting (e.g. of j/k rules which distinguishes most good fonts from the junk), and presents only a description of the results of rule interpretation to the browser, and even then a dictionary attack to derive the empirical rules would be fairly trivial with or without signing/certificates and the like.
There are 1.1... kinds of people.
Now I know what to disable first in Firefox 3.6.
From the article about sIFR:
It accomplishes this by using a combination of javascript, CSS, and Flash...If Flash isn’t installed (or obviously if javascript is turned off), the (X)HTML page displays as normal...the script creates Flash movies of the same dimensions
So it re-renders all of the text as a series of Flash movies. What a *great* idea.
The Wikimedia family of sites render equations as PNGs and use workarounds like the java cortado player to play Ogg Vorbis and Ogg Theora content in the browser, but only as a workaround until something better comes out. Now that several browsers have the tag working, you can bet that Wikipedia is going to (or already is) making that content directly accessible through standards-based methods. We gotta give Wikipedia credit for using standardized, non-proprietary methods of doing so.
coding is life
Unless I'm not understanding this, it seems like at some point in the communication -- the font information is still being communicated to the client. Even if it's encrypted, it would still seem to me that the entire font could be extracted and rebuilt at some level just by viewing it.
How long until we see an application (or a web-based application) that does exactly this?
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This is going to be so great in 10 years when IE supports it fully and enough users are running that version of IE to make it worth the implementation time.
How long before Microsoft embraces and extends this format?
The problem here is not that MS will extend/embrace, but that they will ignore. If IE does not implement this, it will be a long long time before serious Web designers / developers pay attention to it. The sad but simple fact: IE is still has the market share.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
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?
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: "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.
memomo: free web based language trainer DE-EN-ES-FR-IT
If I want PDF, I know where to find it...
"Don't ask for whom the ^G tolls."
dude... what?
Web Open Representation for Fonts....
Just so we could have WORF as an acronym.
"Today is a good day to be rendered!"
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Yeah, not gonna happen for exactly this reason. At least IE will not support this. And Mozilla will be on rather explosive legal territory if they decide to go ahead and seriously implement this. And I'm pretty sure that this is also the reason users can't include fonts in .doc/.docx/.odt files. And before someone suggests font subsets, it's doubtful that would work well on the web.
Thats trivial to fix, add an option to not allow fonts that aren't on the site itself. I'm not sure why the browser can selectively do it for these fonts but not for CSS fonts. Any technical reason you come up with is going to be obviously bunk.
You argue that this is important for font foundries. Well, that in and of itself is the first problem, font foundries are ridiculous and have more retarded licensing than MS. Second, how long do you think its going to take for an extension to come out that works around it. You can't control this, the idea that the file format can is just silly when you're talking about implementing it in an OSS package.
You started off by saying its not really a new format, just an OT wrapper, and then you follow up with 'its a new format' so it doesn't take along the baggage. This is contridictor, either its based on opentype and brings the baggage or it isn't, pick one.
There is no copy protection in OSS software, if you have the code its trivial to change it and work around it. Are you saying that Mozilla is going to promote using a binary blob in their browser?
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. Of course no one does at the moment, but thats another story. I find it hard to believe that a new format will be better supported when SVG support is in the state it is.
A new font technology is going to bring fonts with increased readability? WTF? I've yet to see anyone use a font better than the old reliables included in Windows and Mac OS. I've seen plenty of fonts that are about as far from readable as you can get and still read them because they were made by some random person with no clue about whats important in typography. How is a new format going to change any existing problem? Its not.
How the hell did you get modded informative while talking in circles, contridicting yourself multiple times along the way?
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Another nail in the print media coffin.
CSS 3 Web Fonts is already a done deal, so is there some real reason we need yet another way to get fonts to a user? If the font won't work on their browser, fall back to browser default, wow, it won't look as purdy, boo-hoo.
Do I read the article right? It's just a compression scheme for OpenType?
"FontFont expects to license fonts for Web use in this format."
Yeah, I read that about a week ago. The keyword here is "expects". Why didn't they say "will"? As I said, I believe it when I see it.
Twice now I have been forced to develop a website in Flash when the only reason the client would not accept standards-compliant CSS pages was the font limitations. Not a moment too soon, I say.
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.
memomo: free web based language trainer DE-EN-ES-FR-IT
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...
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"A font in the .webfont format couldn't be trivially installed on a computer for use, so it offered some protection from casual copying."
Does this mean they made it difficult to use instead of adding DRM?
There is one already. NoScript has a setting to ignore @font-face in non-whitelisted addresses.
Does it include a "blink" attribute?
That is all.
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.
Hmm interesting, I guess like how OpenType was pretty much Apple's TrueType with some extra goodies.
How will this affect download times?
When will we be able to tune the Typesettings in CSS? Kerning, Tracking, etc?
Will we finally see an adequate, standardized implementation of LaTeX online? The lack of such an implementation was recently lamented by Fields Medal winner Terrance Tao on his blog: http://terrytao.wordpress.com/2009/10/29/displaying-mathematics-on-the-web/
So, in this corner we have Embedded Open Type which has been supported by the last four versions of IE, but little used because no one wants to use features tied to one browser.
In the other corner, we have the challenger, WOFF, the new kid in town.
Will one of them win or will they battle to a draw, leaving web designers with a choice between using web-safe fonts and the work of supporting two standards. In the latter case, we'll be stuck with boring typography for years.
EOT is on its way through W3C standardization. WOFF is still a prototype that smells like yet another "anything but Microsoft" ploy. Let's hope that Microsoft decides to humour them.
I'm a Programmer. That's one level above Software Engineer and one level below Engineer.
> How long until we see an application (or a web-based application) that does
> exactly this?
I don't think that any significant number of users would bother with such a thing (or even be aware that the possibility exists). Fonts aren't music.
I don't like the idea of more loony fonts, but it's a worthwhile tradeoff if it reduces the number of all-Flash sites.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
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.
That's not actually true. The default setting in Firefox is going to be disallow cross-site font hosting, but, from the article:
The ability to load fonts from other domains can be enabled by a server using Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS).
At last my website can be in Futura! (for those who don't know, Futura is a totally awesome font that hardly any OS has by default).
Really though, if this thing catches on, and I don't see why it shouldn't, then the age of the Web entirely in Arial, Verdana, Courier, Times New Roman or whatever else we are limited to will be a thing of the past.
You just got troll'd!
SVG has a font mechanism that seems perfect for this (including compression).
Why are they inventing something new?
The ratio of people to cake is too big
No one longs for those days.
I've been waiting for this since the days of IE6 - I remember experimenting with an IE-specific way of embedding bitmap fonts into a web page. They looked horrible and only worked on IE; no good. As a stopgap measure, I've implemented a PHP script (called textfrag) which essentially renders all fonts server-side and sends them to the browser as GIFs. This works rather effectively - you can see this in action on my personal website http://slinq.com/ ..and before any of you say anything, I don't care about accessibility and it doesn't seem to have hurt my search engine rankings. Textfrag is available to download from my website (opensource / free / don't care) although it's still on its first release - I will be continuing development on this until such time as there is a standard way of embedding a vector font into a web page that works on every browser (probably still a long way off). Even then - it's problematic - the law in my country (as I understand it) makes bitmap renderings of any font freely redistributable (you cannot claim copyright protection of a bitmap font), but distrubiting a vector font requires that you be licensed to do so.
If so, can you remind me which font is often known as "Dogfucker Sans" in typography circles due to the designer's criminal convictions for fucking both the family dog and his daughters?
I though it was Garamond or maybe Gill, but I see no mention in the Wikipedia articles. Please help, as there is a limit to how many search terms containing the words "dog" and "fucker" that I'm prepared to type into Google in order to satisfy my curiosity. Especially at work.
If Linotype get on board with this I would be so happy. There are already free fonts out there, but I would be willing to pay for Helvetica Neue if I could use it online.
Does WOFF support complex positioning, etc, like graphite? If not it won't be a lot of help for minority languages as the OS or browser will have to know their layout rules to display them properly. Remember the devanagari error in the Wikipedia logo.
Fascinating to watch art critics trying to claim that Gill was excused from civilised behaviour because he was a "genius". (Hint, guys - he isn't.) There was a good cartoon in the Guardian last Saturday - a day in the life of Eric Gill. Like the Monty Python Australian University rules where every second one was "no poofters", every second frame of the Gill cartoon is labelled "Censored".
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Web browsers will not be able to catch up in readability with print because of screen resolution. They will also not be able to catch up with expressiveness because of screen resolution as well. All these sublety that typographers always rail about when it comes to fonts is lost when there are just 13 pixels to render a capital letter. At this size it is not even possible to distinguish for example properly hinted Arial, Frutiger, Univers and Helvetica.
All this is just the result of 15 years of whining from graphic designers wanting their fonts back -- because they think that fonts are the solution for all design challenges.
But whatever, if it makes them shut up finally i will be happy.
Firefox will have a default same-origin restriction, so it will only load WOFF fonts from the same domain as the webpage being loaded—a restriction that puts type vendors at ease. The ability to load fonts from other domains can be enabled by a server using Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS).
A font in the .webfont format couldn't be trivially installed on a computer for use, so it offered some protection from casual copying.
Okay, so this mechanism allows for embedded fonts that are somewhat locked down. But what does this mean for some simple use cases?
For example, let's say that I navigate to a website on my laptop and save an html page to disk. Does that saved page include all embedded fonts?
What if I copy that page to someone else's computer -- does the page render properly on their system as well? Does it have to "phone home," so to speak, in order to render the page as correctly as possible? (I'm sensing another avenue for websites to track the distribution of documents)
Will there be pressure from type vendors to keep these fonts locked down? Is user freedom going to negatively be affected?
As others have stated in this thread, html documents should degrade gracefully, however this is very rarely put into practice. Hopefully these new embedded fonts will be used for good (or for awesome, as Strong Bad would say), and will not turn into one more easily-abused, headache-inducing web feature.
coding is life
In Chrome an incognito tab to handle your Gmail/whatever would do the trick.
I mean incognito *window.*
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
You could argue that he's doing it wrong, and he shouldn't be feeding us binary images when he's trying to convey words. On the other hand, you could argue that his site is really nice looking, conveys his message really well, and it's a pity that it's impossible to do this without resorting to such hacks that make the text un-ctrl-f'able, or unreadable by screen readers.
Impossible? Hardly. Well-written alternate text substitutes nicely for an image of text. I just looked at Seth Godin's page in Firefox 3.5 for Windows, and the only problems I see are that 1. the images' alternate text is too short (should be the same text as in the image), and 2. the image maps don't have alternate text.
You forgot that this same-domain rule also protects you from the font hoster changing the font to something that could harm your site. Like making the title of your site look like something insulting or gross.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
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.
Text in images is not Ctrl-F searchable
This is a limitation of user agents. Ideally, Ctrl+F should search images' alternate text as if it were in the page as an ordinary text node.
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.
Free software communities have shown the ability to create utilitarian works of high quality. DejaVu fonts, which grew out of the Vera project by Bitstream, are open source utilitarian fonts.
But not all fonts are utilitarian, and a lot of web publishers want specific branding using specific artistic typefaces. For instance, the logo of Nintendo's video game Animal Crossing uses the font Fink Heavy. This is an uneven slab-serif font from the Rat Fink Fonts pack by House Industries, one of the foundries mentioned in the article. If Nintendo could suggest to browsers that headline elements (h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6) on animal-crossing.com SHOULD use Fink Heavy, and the CSS specified a House Industries-approved method of putting the font into the browser, that would make the site's branding more consistent. The point of WOFF is that the foundries are on board.
Why would anyone go to all that effort? If I wanted to pirate fonts, I'm sure I'd find plenty of torrent sources available.
There's no point worrying about piracy, because the pirates already have your product. The only thing you need to worry about is keeping honest people honest, and you do that by making your product easy enough and cheap enough to buy that piracy doesn't look like an attractive option.
I agree. But I think the excuse, "Stupid people get the punishment they deserve" is potentially far too often a cop-out for developers, designers, etc. who simply refuse to perform due diligence in ensuring that honest mistakes (stupid or not) on the part of end users (stupid or not), are kept to a minimum.
If this is a discussion about downloadable fonts, deceptive favicon usage, etc., then you have to realize that the tools "we" create can be designed in ways that can counteract such malicious activities, and we should feel some sense of responsibility over them. And so whining about the stupid fucking lusers all the time just might not be productive.
The important part is that WOFF restricts where the font can be linked to.
Actually this feature was already present in OpenType when I started using OTF in 2001 for a web-to-print application. I don't know if it was the typical MS embrace-and-extend, but when creating OTF from TTF with WEFT you had to specify the URI(s) you wanted to use the fonts from. If you embedded the fonts on any other URI, they would simply display as unstyled text. Some more reading on this is here.
So whatever is the reason for the new format, copy protection isn't it. That was already present in WEFT 2, which came out early 2000, and probably in WEFT 1, too.
Who is General Failure and why is he reading my hard disk?
"fonts aren't music"
No. They're much more expensive.
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