Non-standard fonts on the web are getting closer

Here's a nice demo of how linked fonts should look on a browser near you. This is possible because Apple has forced the issue a little: while the technology isn’t very hard to understand, there is much discussion about the intricacies of protecting restricting the typefaces used so that – for example – a design agency can use a font they have bought from a type foundry without infringing their licence. As can be imagined some people think this capability threatens their livelihood current business model; some think that DRM should be mandatory for this technology even when, as in the demo, the font is free-as-in-beer zero-price software with a licence allowing whatever distribution results from sticking it on a web server. In the case of the fonts used on the demo page, the licence says:

You may use the fonts on an unlimited number of websites using the font-face command. To do so you can upload the fonts on a public webserver or you may embed the fonts in SWF files or similar web documents.

You will need Safari 3.1 to see the demo.

The way it works is simple. Quoting the CSS:

@font-face {
font-family: "GraublauWeb";
src: url(http://www.fonts.info/info/press/GraublauWeb-Regular) format("truetype");
}

This directive tells the browser that whenever it sees a reference to ‘Grablau-Web’ it should use the font it grabbed from http://www.fonts.info/info/press/GraublauWeb-Regular.

Thanks to Dave for the link.
11 April 2008: corrected following suggestions from Dave.