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."

Comments

Re:Easier fonts means a lot!

[zonky]

Surely there are security concerns around sites using fonts where the letters are 'swapped' to obfusicate where links are actually directed?

Does anyone else long for the days...

[Richard Steiner]

...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? :-)

Re:Does anyone else long for the days...

[farnsworth]

...when the web was more about content than fancy presentation?

I believe that's the point of why this is needed. Currently, if an author wants or needs precise layout with specific fonts, they pretty much have to use flash or images. This hurts accessibility to content. For example, Seth Godin's site has plenty of content, but no text. 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.

I believe the point of WOFF is to add semantic information to pages that authors want to appear in a very specific way, and that's a good thing.

Re:Easier fonts means a lot!

[zonky]

Actually, Opera did have a hole like this recently: http://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/detail?vulnId=CVE-2009-3832

Re:format does not matter, it's about download lim

[kill-1]

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.

Re:Easier fonts means a lot!

[maxume]

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:

<a href="http://www.example.com" onmousedown="this.href=buildlink(...)">link</a>

Lets you and him fight

[thethibs]

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.

Re:Brillian idea

[plasticsquirrel]

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.

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.

Most /. 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.