WOFF 1.0: A Milestone on W3C's Journey of Fonts on the Web
I reflect on the evolution of Web Fonts from early licensing debates to the DRM-free success of WOFF 1.0. By uniting browser engineers and typographers, we created a standard that transformed web typography. This journey led to WOFF 2.0 and an Emmy Award, while we now focus on Incremental Font Transfer to support complex scripts and slow networks.
Today, the question is less about whether a website uses web fonts, but rather which specific typefaces it displays and whether they use font features to display their full expressive potential.
- nicoburns
WOFF2 is pretty cool. I recently ported the C++ woff2 library (https://github.com/google/woff2 - as used by Chrome, Firefox) to Rust (https://github.com/nicoburns/wuff), and it turn out WOFF2 has a bunch of custom font-specific compression algorithms.
WOFF1 is kinda boring from a technical perspective: it's just gzip in a font container.
- Lammy
Article's history section neglects to mention Bitstream's TrueDoc Portable Font Resource format which was supported as a downloadable font standard by Netscape Communicator (4.x series).
- Post-first-browser-war version of spec: https://web.archive.org/web/20040407162455/http://www.bitstr...
- Natively supported in Netscape 4: https://web.archive.org/web/19970630083015fw_/http://develop...
- And was available as an ActiveX Control for IE4: https://web.archive.org/web/19990421092859/http://www.truedo... https://web.archive.org/web/19990224045109/http://www.truedo...
And despite being forgotten on Web still found a niche in various broadcast TV standards:
“The PFR specification defines the Bitstream portable font resource (PFR), which is a compact, platform-independent format for representing high-quality, scalable outline fonts. Many independent organizations responsible for setting digital TV standards have adopted the PFR font format as their standard font format, including:
- ATSC (Advanced Television Systems Committee)
- DAVIC (Digital Audio Visual Council)
- DVB (Digital Video Broadcasting)
- DTG (Digital TV Group)
- MHP (Multimedia Home Platform)
- ISO/IEC 16500-6:1999
- OCAP (OpenCable Application Platform)”
e: The linked 2022 retrospective does mention it in passing, but considering it shipped natively-supported in the #1 browser of the era I think it deserves to not be buried :) https://www.w3.org/TR/2022/NOTE-font-rationale-20220414/
- altern8
Why is the new logo a stamp you find on some cheese wheels, like Parmigiano