When Web designers ask me about techniques to manage media assets for their various clients, the discussions almost always seem to drift eventually toward handling decorative or fancy fonts– or, even more commonly, just fonts that are not the “usual suspects” that most end users may have installed on their computers.
While we’ve gone so far out of our collective way to accommodate the LCD of end users, it has unfortunately crippled us with regard to providing a comfortable, “directly as intended” view of our Web designs because of the lack of the appropriate typefaces (fonts) installed on the users’ machines. To get past this, the current prevailing technique is to use LOTS of images of the text in question rendered with the intended fonts… which has led in many cases to heavy load times, nasty display scaling problems, and messy asset versioning.
So now comes the Web font (sometimes seen as “webfont”) concept, which extends the style linking idea to fonts. It’s not a new idea, as Jon has mentioned in his history-in-a-nutshell editorial. In fact, for those of you who remember joining Microsoft’s Web designer network waaaay back in the early 1990′s, you may recall the Microsoft [MSFT] Typography site, which offered the Georgia, Tahoma, Trebuchet, Courier New, Verdana, Comic Sans, etc. “new” fonts for free as an incentive to encourage their adoption for Web site development. Great idea, but not quite standardized… yet.
Fast forward to now.
Matt recently mentioned his interest in Web fonts, and there are certainly some rumblings in the standards community to get the ball rollin’ again. Not to say that there was a complete cessation of making Web fonts available readily, but attention has been paid to so many other things in the community… 
Here’s a wiki that has been created to contain some information about Web fonts, with several useful links to other resources on the subject.
A major controversy about Web fonts and making the fonts that you’re potentially interested in using for your signage, headers, or common text is the bugbear around copyrights and DRM. Couple that with the desire to stabilize on a single standard, and ensuring that Web viewports (like Web browsers, embedded device readers, and other textual fetch mechanisms) correctly render the content using the expected font, and it already seems like a daunting task.
Should we be using TrueType, OpenType, EOT, or something else that is yet to emerge? Should there be callable Web APIs or Web services that pump out protected typefaces for select customers? Should governments block font access due to copyright enforcement within their geographic borders? No easy answers yet, unfortunately, but plenty of ideas to think about…
More Reading
Here’s some interesting reading and discussions about font usage on the Web, and Web fonts (some may know this as “font linking” or “font refs”):
- “Facing Up To Fonts” (Richard Rutter) – [PDF]
- “Font Linking” (Chris Shiflett)
- 23 October 2008 W3C meeting minutes about EOT and font embedding (don’t forget to take a look at the page source for this!)
- 2006 discussion about font links within the context of W3C specification
- 2006 discussion at Typophile about font linking
- Ascender Corporation study of free and shareware Web fonts
