Understanding Web Fonts: book proposal

Comments on this proposal appreciated.

Synopsis

This short book will offer a guide to anyone who wants to understand and implement web fonts. Its practical section will concentrate on WOFF fonts which seem overwhelmingly likely to offer the most future-aware and ideology-free format. The goal will be to give web designers and developers a clear understanding of the new technology, so they know when and how to implement it.

The Project

I would like to invite collaborators and contributors personally, but anyone who wants to contribute is welcome to contact me as project originator so we can compare notes.

The text will be written online, although see http://www.socialbysocial.com/book/creation-social-by-social

It will be published under GNU Free Documentation License, v1.3 or later, and the copyright will be held by ‘Contributors to the Webfonts book’.

A commercial publishing agreement will be sought. This would be comparable to the agreements for books like Version control with Subversion and Pro Git. If the book is published commercially then any royalties will be distributed between contributors involved in each static release (== print edition). http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html

To set the topic in context it will give in about 10,000 words

• an outline of the history of the technology
• an explanation of advantages, both perceived and real
• a guide to the history of typeface publishing, to explain where the special problems come from
• a concise set of use cases for web fonts:
  • graphic design and branding considerations (the major commercial drivers)
  • academic research into ancient languages and transliterated documents that use obsolete characters
  • minority languages (those poorly supported by operating systems: the Indian subcontinent, for example)

The main text of the book, which is at a first guess estimated at 15,000 words or so, would provide

• technical info about the preferred format, WOFF, as a set of references to, and elaboration of, documentation emerging online (eg the Kew/Leming/van Blokland WOFF spec, the W3C Web Fonts group charter and Candidate Recommendation pages)
• howtos for authors wanting to
  • use cloud font services like Typekit
  • make WOFF fonts, including advice on subsetting for lower bandwidth/faster rendering
  • host web fonts
  • create style rules that encompass the widest range of user agents
  • understand their legal rights and obligations when using commercial web fonts

Then, as it is very early days, we may speculate briefly on what will happen in the future in about 5,000 words:

• impact on the web
• impact on the font publishing world
• Fine typography in user agents, eg the Mozilla demo by Jonathan Kew. http://bit.ly/3sXGLh
• an opportunity for free/libre fonts?

References

Documentation

• woff http://people.mozilla.org/~jkew/woff/woff-2009-10-03.html

Demos

• http://www.princexml.com/howcome/2009/megalopolis/sample.html

Discussions

• www-font mailing list archive http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-font/

EOT Lite [CWT], Mozilla et al

• http://typophile.com/node/60220

Discussion/analysis: oldish but set context

• http://shiflett.org/blog/2008/oct
• http://jontangerine.com/log/2008/10/font-face-in-ie-making-web-fonts-work
• http://jontangerine.com/log/2009/03/skillswap-goes-typographic

Edit: corrected heading hierarchy

Green lights ahead for WOFF web fonts

OK, following an entertaining summer of debate on the www-fonts list at W3C and elsewhere, things are moving along nicely now in the world of web fonts. Yesterday saw two significant announcements:

• the W3C Web Fonts Working Group gained a charter, albeit a little draft, which means a group should be getting together soon to formalise the Recommendation on the technical details of web fonts
• over in the real world, Mozilla published a list of 33 proprietary font software vendors (‘typefoundries’) who endorse the WOFF format developed initially by Tal Leming and Erik van Blokland, later by Jonathan Kew and John Daggett.

A key benefit of WOFF is that it carries metadata and this metadata doesn’t have to stick to a rigid set of predefined fields. That leaves the door open for people to expose some of the information about publishing and rights which is usually hidden: stuff like who drew the outlines and when. In the case of remixed permissively-licensed fonts (using the SIL OFL for example) it could also include a log of which other open fonts were mixed, matched and modified to produce the end result. Think Zlicko, Deck, Barnbrook and co for the network age.

And yes, Microsoft is coming to the party. Hopefully without stinkbombs.

Royal dog in the manger

I know that Royal Mail is a sort-of commercial entity (well, it’s at least partially a limited company), and I realise that having belatedly realised how useful postcodes are in an information-rich and hence information-dependent society they’re only doing what anyone would do when they act to prevent the use of the postcode database they inherited from more socially enlightened days without agreement of a substantial license fee. I also realise that its maintenance costs time, money and some expertise. I also realise that operating a system that circumvents the protection they’ve placed on the data will trigger cease-and-desist letters, however smartly done.

On the other hand, it is undoubtedly in the national interest for this data to be more widely available, especially when we consider the potential for services that might cater for the less-privileged rather than to big business budgets. I’d vote for a publicly-owned Royal Mail with publicly-accessible postcode-to-geocode data; that might be the fairest bargain to strike given that Royal Mail sells services based around the data it keeps about us all, without our conscious agreement.