Slashdot Mirror
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
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
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.
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! :)
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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
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.
No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.
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...
---- Please be nice in case my Slashdot karma ~= my real life karma.
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.
Most
Systemd: the PulseAudio of init systems
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.