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.

A little more on font linking

I've just been playing with HTML font linking* using the info in the 2002 W3C Web Fonts Working Draft. Works beautifully. You specify the weight, style (regular/italic), and stretch (condensed/normal/expanded) - and off you go! For example:

@font-face {
  font-family: "DejaVu Serif";
  src: url("http://example.com/free-libre-font-files/dejavu-fonts-ttf-2.26/DejaVuSerif-Italic.ttf") format("TrueType");
  font-weight: 400;
  font-style: italic;
  font-stretch: normal;
}
@font-face {
  font-family: "DejaVu Serif";
  src: url("http://example.com/free-libre-font-files/dejavu-fonts-ttf-2.26/DejaVuSerif.ttf") format("TrueType");
  font-weight: 400;
  font-style: normal;
  font-stretch: normal;
}

body {
  font-family: "DejaVu Serif", serif;
}

And by magic, regular and italic variants will be found and used. Note how the two @font-face at-rules have the same font-family value, thus grouping them as one typeface.

OK, it's a little bit of work, but the indirection gives scope for future flexibility. Just remember kids: always read the licence!

Browsers: Firefox 3.1 (font-linking build) and Safari 3.1 on OS X.