Web Open Font Format backed by Mozilla, type foundries (ars technica) [LWN.net]

Web Open Font Format backed by Mozilla, type foundries (ars technica)

Posted Nov 5, 2009 9:14 UTC (Thu) by renox (subscriber, #23785)
In reply to: Web Open Font Format backed by Mozilla, type foundries (ars technica) by nim-nim
Parent article: Web Open Font Format backed by Mozilla, type foundries (ars technica)

>It got to such ridiculous levels someone asked the Open Font Library project to woff-isize all its fonts (all of which are supposed to be floss in the first place)

This is a good idea: if the floss fonts are already packaged as woff fonts *without* renaming then the browser may be able to avoid downloading those fonts again.
If someone else do the convertion then, there is the risk that they rename the fonts..

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Web Open Font Format backed by Mozilla, type foundries (ars technica)

Posted Nov 5, 2009 9:46 UTC (Thu) by johill (subscriber, #25196) [Link]

Thank for you putting that differently, I think nobody really understood me :)

Web Open Font Format backed by Mozilla, type foundries (ars technica)

Posted Nov 5, 2009 9:48 UTC (Thu) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]

BTW, for people who want to know the non-angelic part of the WOFF story, read that: http://typophile.com/node/63778

1. WOFF is only "needed" to appease proprietary foundries (and Microsoft)
2. WOFF is being deployed in Firefox before any actual commitment to support it IE-side by Microsoft
3. People push for WOFF-ization of FLOSS fonts so they can bury the direct (non woffed) font linking already implemented by every major browser except IE¹ (and the IE team has not even committed to WOFF support)

4. And they do not do this because they care about FLOSS fonts, quite the contrary, but because they do not want to be at competitive disadvantage to FLOSS fonts (the messages speak for themselves)

So it's a "let's neuter non-IE browsers and degrade support for FLOSS fonts, if we do this maybe eventually someday Microsoft and proprietary foundries will accept to play ball too" story.

Also even if IE did implement some form of WOFF, there is zero way to know today their WOFF support would not be partial or unuseable in the field as had happened all too often in the past.

¹ http://people.mozilla.org/~jdaggett/AdvancingWebTypograph... page 44