Microsoft sponsors new Web font standard
With a surprise boost from Microsoft, the promise of rich typography on the Web just got a big step closer to reality.
The software company's involvement emerged Monday with sponsorship of a newer effort at the World Wide Web Consortium to standardize Web-based fonts with technology called the Web Open Font Format (WOFF). It's a fresh indicator of Microsoft's serious engagement with new Web standards--and it's a big boost for designers' attempts to stretch the Web beyond just the few typefaces that today can be expected to be already installed on people's computers.
It's not unusual to see Mozilla and Opera Software as WOFF backers--the two browser makers have been trying to advance the Web state of the art for years. But after years of going its own way, Microsoft has shown new interest in Web standards and now is a powerful ally that's sponsoring the submission of WOFF to be a W3C standard.
"Given the increasing interest in WOFF from browser implementors, tool creators, and type foundries [it] is expected that WOFF will soon serve as that single, interoperable format and that other implementors will add support over time," the W3C's WebFonts Working Group said of the move.
The move was notable enough that Tiro Typeworks' John Hudson used bold italic to spotlight Microsoft's WOFF involvement. Type foundry Hoefler & Frere-Jones opted for ALL CAPS.
Microsoft's IE9, though available only in a half-baked preview edition so far, has sent ripples throughout the browser world as a product that restores Microsoft. It's not yet clear whether IE9 will support WOFF, and Microsoft didn't comment on its plans, but the signs are good it will.
For comparison, Microsoft joined a Web graphics standard effort called Scalable Vector Graphics in January, and a few weeks later, the IE9 prototype emerged with strong support for SVG. And note that hardware-accelerated, high-quality fonts are one of the front-and-center features of IE9.
The W3C chartered a new Web fonts group in March to standardize WOFF. The WOFF standard submission "allows that technical work to commence," the Web font group said.
WOFF is one of a handful of technologies designed to improve typography on the Web. Most Web pages are constructed with a small set of relatively common fonts, but some designers want to add more customization or style by using specific typefaces. Today, that's often done by adding graphics, but that approach is best for limited areas such as logos, and it breaks useful computing features such as the ability to copy and paste text.
Newer browsers let designers invoke many Web fonts these days using the "@font-face" instruction on Web pages, but Web font technologies are inconsistently supported by browsers. Among the other technologies available are Embedded OpenType (EOT) for embedding TrueType and OpenType from Microsoft and SVG Fonts, which thus far are the only Web fonts supported by the iPhone and iPad.
The Diavlo typeface demonstrated as a Web font at Ralf Herrmann's Typography Weblog.
(Credit: Ralf Herrmann's Typography Weblog)WOFF attempts to address some of the problems of these other font embedding approaches. One is download size, an important consideration for Web developers who want fast-loading pages. WOFF reduces size through compression and by letting Web developers offer only the necessary subset of characters for a Web page rather than the entire font.
Another concern is intellectual property. Font shops, whose designs aren't copy-protected, are leery of making the fruits of their labor available for free download. WOFF accommodates metadata that can include type designer and licensing information, and the downloaded fonts aren't the sort of thing that can be installed on a person's computer. "Web FontFonts come in formats that work only on websites (not in any desktop app), and do so without crippleware or user interruptions," said font foundry FontFont, which began licensing its fonts in WOFF format in February.
There are signs of success. The creators of WOFF--Tal Leming of Type Supply, Erik van Blokland of LetError, and Jonathan Kew of Mozilla--apparently have rounded up significant support from various font foundries, including Adobe Systems, House Industries, ITC Fonts, Linotype, and Monotype.
Mozilla introduced WOFF support with Firefox 3.6. Other major browsers--Internet Explorer, Safari, Opera, and Chrome--support @font-face already, paving the way for WOFF support should they choose to add it.
It's not imminent, though. So far, Chrome developers haven't begun tackling WOFF support in earnest, with the feature tracker just listing WOFF support as "untriaged." Chrome and Apple's Safari are based on the open-source WebKit project. But WebKit's WOFF support also is up in the air, with nobody yet taking on responsibility for the matter, according to the WebKit bug-tracker.
But things are moving fast in the browser world these days. WOFF is by no means a guaranteed success, but Microsoft and Mozilla together account for the vast majority of browser usage on the Net today. Their support alone is enough to give WOFF the necessary boost to relevance, once people upgrade their browsers and Web developers learn the new technology.
Stephen Shankland writes about a wide range of technology and products, but has a particular focus on browsers and digital photography. He joined CNET News in 1998 and since then also has covered Google, Yahoo, servers, supercomputing, Linux and open-source software, and science. E-mail Stephen, follow him on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/stshank, or contact him through Google Buzz. 
Argh.
One exception: CAPTCHAS. After that, I agree with you perfectly.
I doubt "graceful degradation" or "progressive enhancement" have ever crossed your feeble mind, but let me *try* to explain.
Fonts are broken up into sans-serif and serif. Often, when a developer codes the fonts for a site, they will choose a font-family like "Arial, sans-serif" meaning that if someone doesn't have Arial, that person's default sans-serif font is used.
Being the smart character that you are, I'm sure you've removed all system fonts but Arial and Times New Roman and take advantage of graceful degradation already.
I can see you both now god damn that Microsoft!!!!
Foaming at the mouth.
I run both IE8 and FF.
Note that this isn't a Microsoft-specific thing. Fonts are something that have given printing houses headaches of the intellectual-property kind for decades.
*Protection of their Intellectual Property* is the headache for the type foundries. Specifically, if you have a web-page with a font embedded in it, and a client downloads that font from the website to render the page (using the proposed standard) what is to stop the user from saving this font and using it in their documents, graphics, etc. -- even though the user has not paid royalties on the font -- it is the website that embedded the font in their page that would have licensed it for the use of people visiting their site.
The solution to this is addressed in the standard in a non-classical-DRM way. To put it simply, the proposed standard is sufficiently different from OpenType/ClearType etc. that desktop apps simply won't use fonts downloaded by this mechanism.
In the DRM world this would be DRM by obfuscation as opposed to cryptographically enforced DRM. Of course, all DRM systems rely on obfuscation to hide a root key at some level -- but this isn't even sophisticated obfuscation. It's just a general "this isn't compatible with that" obfuscation. Hopefully for the type foundries, it will suffice. That would be good for users as well -- because the minute any kind of sophisticated DRM scheme is used to secure the fonts, the performance overhead will start to threaten the usefulness of the feature.
I'm glad that MS is starting to look in the right direction. Standards is the way to go! I'm also confident that Safari and Chrome will join the effort as well.
bfd...
Cody
Besides, the website of the 1990s were awful because it was a young technology. Unless you can think of any technology that is unchanged from the first 5 years of its introduction, I got to say, web technology has visually changed for the better since the 1990s in ways most industries will never.
@solitare_pax: what basis do you have for what you have posted? Your computer will not be clogged with fonts any more than it is now.
@iConquered: No one said it was open source. Fonts will never be open sourced. Too much work goes into creating decent looking and well behaved fonts to make them open source.
Fonts are under_appreciated. Let the creativity juices flow.
Good on MS. Better for the rest of us.
That's all we need, to go and download a new font at each site we go to because some moron web designer was trying to be hip.
Seems like a solution in search or a problem. Fonts on the web are just fine. I'm sure there are other problems to tackle that might do more good.
Yes -- and rightly so.
Look up Matthew Carter:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Carter
He's a famous typographer who has essentially spent his entire life perfecting the art and science of type.
Also consider, for example, the creation of the font Verdana (or Georgia, Times New Roman, Tahoma, etc.):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verdana
There was a need identified for these fonts -- low resolution computer screens at the time didn't work well with most existing fonts. The mandate was to create fonts that worked well on these machines. It took a legend in the field, combined with someone famous for "hinting" (clues that inform the rendering algo), combined with a team of developers creating the right algorithms, to make fonts as readable on computer screens as they are today. It also took a lot of money. Creations like this should be copyrightable like any other.
Haven't you noticed how crowded many WORD documents and web pages seem to be these days? That's likely the reason. Students no longer get actual typewriter training these days. In the OLD DAYS (LOL!), we learned to always put in two spaces right after the period of the previous sentence. This made typed documents more readable AND more elegant to look at.
I'm a retired tech writer/editor who has spent a lot of time putting in the extra space after each period of a sentence to improve the look and readability of someone else's document.
I hope this issue will be addressed by all makers of word processing programs as well as by those who teach PC Typing classes these days.
first, there's no need to put two spaces after period/full stop, as modern, well-designed proportional fonts have the extra space built in. The 'two-space' rule was for mechanical typewriters, which largely used fixed-width fonts. Also, web browsers 'hide' multiple word spaces automatically, so you can add as many as you like but they won't be visible.
second, regarding use of lots of fonts. I recall the advice of a good designer I worked with way back when (early '80s -- you lurking, Don French?), who used just two fonts for everything except the occasional display headline -- Palatino and Optima. Elegant sans and serif fonts that could do it all. The rest is just indulgence by the 'designer'. Not to say use those two, but find a pair of workhorse fonts and stick with them. I use Frutiger almost exclusively -- it has a wide range of weights and widths, is modern, easy to read and elegant-looking (to my eye). Serif face I reserve for long stuff, like book pages.
For web pages, Verdana and Georgia -- very readable, and because I like oldstyle numbers. (hmmm what did I say about indulgence? :> )
If cnet or other sites don't support it that's their fault. I type two sentence in gmail all the time, and it very much shows up as two spaces. I can put 10 spaces between words and it shows up as 10 spaces in my e-mail.
If google can support it when sending e-mail with their web client, then I'm sure it's possible for webpage makers to support it on their posted content or in user comments.
Cody
- by April 28, 2010 11:20 PM PDT
- Microsoft embraces the standard in order to strangle it.
- Like this Reply to this comment 1 person likes this comment
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