Web Fontography Fun

With the rise of @font-face font linking in the all of the “big five” desktop browsers—Safari, Firefox, Opera, and Chrome—true web-specific typography is beginning to take shape.

In an excellent blog post from "A List Apart," Richard Fink looks at several events that have brought web typography to the forefront and addresses some of the issues it still faces. He covers the following in depth:

1. A Web Fonts Working Group was chartered at the W3C on March 18, 2010. Its first order of business was to establish the WOFF specification as the standard compressed “wrapper” format for delivering sfnt (OTF and TTF) fonts on the web.
2. Font rendering in IE9 using Windows’s DirectWrite has been unveiled via the see-for-yourself IE9 Platform Preview.
3. The first round of web font preparation tools like Font Squirrel’s @Font-FaceGenerator and EOTFAST have appeared.
4. A new wave of “font hosting and obfuscation” services (FHOS) have appeared alongside Typekit, Typotheque, and the free and open source Kernest.
5. The first “trusting” web font licenses from commercial font designers have appeared.
6. The CSS3 Fonts Module has evolved to include some of the advanced features of OpenType.
7. Adobe Flash, once a reliable cross-platform means of text replacement (sIFR), now appears permanently crippled.
8. Google has launched a free font-hosting service for a growing library of fonts. All of them available for self-hosting, too.

First of all, it's about time we found a way to use more fonts on the web. I'm really amazed it took this long!

Second, the new font formats for the web mentioned in the post including WOFF are a step in the right direction. WOFF is essentially a zipped font file that will soon be the standard “transport format” for fonts. It’s gaining support from Mozilla and Chrome right now and was sponsored by Microsoft and Opera in a submission to the W3C Fonts Working Group.

And finally (thankfully), Fink points out that he believes the Font Hosting And Obfuscation Services (FHOS) such as Typekit, Typotheque, Kernest and others are just a passing phase on the way to much better supported web typography solutions. We’re still in the growing pains of this new technology.

"You can view FHOS as a phase. Services are innovating. For example, the WebINK service from Extensis features a free installable “preview wizard” of sorts called Type Drawer that enables you, among other things, to instantly swap selected fonts on your page with drag and drop simplicity. This can be a huge time saver and it is certainly the kind of authoring tool designers need. Right now it’s proprietary to the WebINK service, but still it helps in shaping things to come."