Web Open Font Format (WOFF) Support From Mozilla, Opera and Microsoft

[engine]

Web Open Font Format (WOFF) Support From Mozilla, Opera and Microsoft [news.softpedia.com]

The makers of Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera have worked together to produce WOFF (Web Open Font Format), and to submit the 1.0 specification to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Published on April 19, the WOFF File Format 1.0 specification represents a key step forward in terms of standardizing a web font format. Essentially, Microsoft, Mozilla, Opera and additional companies share the same perspective over a common encoding format for web fonts. WOFF is, in this sense, also a critical evolution as far as browser compatibility is concerned, developed as an open, compressed encoding for sfnt-based font resources, according to Sylvain Galineau, IE program manager.

[msantore]

OMG FINALLY!

[joe1182]

Yes!

[WesleyC]

Let the celebration begin!

[johnnie]

Whoopie!

[swa66]

But IE6, 7 and 8 will never support it. And MSFT lost the ability to convince their customers to upgrade their poor excuse for a browser. Also if webkit based browsers (Safari & Chrome) lack, we're still going to miss a chunk of users and it'll still be unusable.

moreover if you read

WOFF has not been put together as a replacement of TrueType/OpenType/Open Font Format or SVG fonts. However, the trio emphasized that WOFF was meant as an alternative to the font formats enumerated above

It sounds like it's going to be even more complexity instead of one font that works everywhere for everything.
We don't need more font specification, we need the browser crafters to implement the existing standard instead as a first step and backport it to their existing browsers (in the case of IE).

[bill]

IE6 was released in 2001 and was actively updated thru 2008. During that time a lot of companies standardized applications and systems that, unfortunately, only work on IE6. Those account for a lot of the hold-outs for upgrading. People on IE7 and IE8 should be able to upgrade much easier to an IE9 browser that would support this.

[tangor]

Fun thing is Opera is in bed with Microsoft and Mozilla on this one. I like the idea. I am afraid, VERY AFRAID that the "creators" of sites will abuse this function terribly. And we all know they will. I foresee many ugly pages to come. Sigh.
_{(not even going to put a smilie on this one)}

[mbjr]

Even more interesting how this will affect the sort of grey area of font licensing :-)

[weeks]

I foresee many ugly pages to come.

Oh, come on. At least it will be the designers and not the technology making the ugly. Have hope. People are discovering templates and using them. It can't get worse, it can only get better.

[poppyrich]

@swa66

We don't need more font specification, we need the browser crafters to implement the existing standard instead as a first step and backport it to their existing browsers (in the case of IE).

1)There is no existing standard, there is a Draft.
2) IE has supported web fonts for 12 years and the implementation is extremely similar to what now exists in FF, Safari, and Chrome.
3) Backwards compatibility/graceful degradation is simply a matter of converting the font to an EOT. Since WOFF, too, requires conversion, I don't think that's a whole lot of effort.
Search: "Convert TrueType Fonts To Compressed EOT" for a convenient tool that does this.
Wrapper formats like EOT and WOFF are not the problem. Those are easily created.
More confusion will be caused by the two main flavors of fonts themselves, TrueType versus OpenType CFF.
But with just a little bit learning, you can get a very interoperable result across all the major browsers.
Better and more reliable information will become available over the next few months. The implementations are very new, and not a lot of people know what they're talking about.
Yet.

[tangor]

It can't get worse, it can only get better.

That's what the print industry said when DTP came out. :)

Actually, I like the concept AND that there are strong players involved this time around. WEFT, all by itself, was not cross-browser enough to make it reasonable to develop font visually appealing sites. WOFF appears to have a good chance of making that happen.

[swa66]

1)There is no existing standard, there is a Draft.

If it's implemented by the majority of browser makers, well described and has (public - open source) reference implementations: then it doesn't matter if the text still says "draft" or not.
It's the de-facto standard. Hence a standard, not just a draft, only a recommendation or whatever the marketing machine tries as an excuse for breaking it.

There are plenty of standards internationally that are used by all without anybody having the power to enforce it. It works well enough if the fans of the monkey boy aren't around to break those processes.
All *we* need to do is tell -better:force- MSFT to finally comply and stop bringing on excuses and more confusion for creating lock-in (now and in the past). While at it, make them finally fix the deployed instances of their poor excuse for a browser (and IE8 still is poor, even if the very last of IE6/IE7 users would upgrade today, IE would still be the worst browser we would have to support out there: no CSS3 unless it was already a proprietary extension of IE6-, despite MSFT staff in the teams writing the specs ...)

[UserFriendly]

Just disable the font download option in Firefox and you won't have to witness what design atrocities are committed.

Set gfx.downloadable_fonts.enabled to false (in about:config) and you'll get your nice, readable, standard fonts.