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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."
...before Microsoft embraces and extends this format?
Surely there are security concerns around sites using fonts where the letters are 'swapped' to obfusicate where links are actually directed?
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.
...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.
The article makes it fairly clear that the fonts are to be available only within the browser and even only on pages from a particular domain.
It's ok, I guess, as long as I can turn it off and force the use of my chosen fonts.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Actually, Opera did have a hole like this recently: http://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/detail?vulnId=CVE-2009-3832
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.
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
Noscript is set to allow Google to be trusted in many areas that others are not. It makes some sense, as Google has been fairly trustworthy until now.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
I actually already had that unchecked; I was remembering poorly. The real tricky attack is to use onmousedown to swap out the link, something like this:
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
I'm sure that "swapped" letters can be solved with font signing... which will be a pain.
Font signing will also be needed to combat code injection via fonts. I remember way back in the day I used to use font resources to piggy-back code I wanted accessible to the entire kernelspace -- after all, a font resource has low-level access to a LOT of user an kernelspace.
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.
You are assuming that the difference between one font and another is purely presentation, and that the user already has adequate fonts available. For those who do not deal with fonts often and the technical needs of many websites, here is an example.
/. readers are happy with a few ANSI characters, as long as they can see some code examples in their web browser, and as long as it renders English correctly, but there is a whole world of people who have entirely different needs.
For romanized Indic text (used in many translations of Hindu and Buddhist literature), a number of Unicode letters and diacritics are needed that go well beyond the characters typically used in Western European languages (for example, IAST). Each platform has different fonts available by default that may handle these characters. Linux has the DejaVu fonts and Apple has Lucida Grande, but Microsoft only has Microsoft Sans Serif, which is the ugly cousin of Arial. In this font, there are no real italics, and the "fake italics" used look hideous because the slant is so exaggerated that they are painful to read. Any website text rendered in this font absolutely stinks for readability and for aesthetics.
I would like to be able to use a standard method of offering a font such as Linux Libertine or DejaVu Sans, that renders acceptably under Windows (most fonts don't), and have that handled in a streamlined way. Otherwise, I am forced to either make web pages that render as ugly as sin under Windows, or put up an optional page that explains how a user can download the font and manually install it. Both of these options are unacceptable for diacritics that should be so standard by now. Microsoft has really dropped the ball on Unicode support in its fonts, and web developers are left to try to cobble together solutions. The only other alternative is to only provide PDF's made with XeTeX, but PDF is no replacement for a web page.
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