The Fight for Fantastic Fonts (or, Let’s Give Tahoma a Rest)
Date : 2008 07 22 Category : Tech & Development
AjaxianWhat's the greater of these evils: contorting site designs around the standard Web-safe fonts, using images to render type, or relying on sIFR to render type with Flash?
Who knows, but man, it sure would be nice if we could reliably use any font we wanted in our web work. And, as it turns out, IE4+ and Safari 3.1 offer mechanisms for doing just that.
Safari's shiny new mechanism is based on the CSS3 @font-face "at-rule", exemplified thusly in the spec:
PLAIN TEXT CSS: @font-face { font-family: "Robson Celtic"; src: url("http://site/fonts/rob-celt") } H1 { font-family: "Robson Celtic", serif }The linked font can be a regular old TrueType font. Compare this to IE6/7 which also support the @font-face at-rule but only support special "Embedded OpenType" fonts.
At first blush, you and I might think, "Yay for Safari! And, thanks IE for yet another screw." But that was before we considered the DRM issues. You see, there's an established technology for enforcing the use of fonts in embedded applications, and CSS's @font-face bypasses it by directly linking to TrueType fonts. At least one major font foundry is mighty uncomfortable with the thought of more browsers following Safari's lead.
Hence fontembedding.com, a newly-launched site promoting the virtues of the long-misunderstood and under-loved Embedded OpenType (EOT) format and the evils of linking to TrueType on the Web, complete with a call to action to other browsers to support EOT once the recent W3C EOT submission is ratified (i.e., maybe we can expect to use them cross-browser in 2014). EOT, you see, embeds the URL of the website that licensed the font for embedded use so that User-Agents can enforce font licensing restrictions.
Fascinating.
I wish them luck with EOT; in the meantime I suspect Firefox will implement @font-face and enough high-quality freely embeddable TrueType fonts will emerge to ensure that EOT remains as irrelevant as it ever was.
But then, I've been wrong before.
Still, fun to realize that as soon as Firefox implements @font-face, thanks to TrueType-EOT converters, we can finally use fonts on the web. Myspace will never be the same.