Web fonts
From RuntimeWiki
Traditionally, browsers can only use fonts that are installed locally on the user's machine. Because of this, Web designers typically restrict themselves to a small list of fonts (roughly 10) that are reliably present on most Windows and Mac machines. A typical list of common fonts can be found at [1].
The "Web fonts" feature (the @font-face feature in CSS) allows browsers to pull fonts down from servers dynamically. Theoretically, this feature would allow a web designer to post arbitrary fonts on their server and thereby allow any font to be available in any browser. The feature is summarized at:
and the CSS spec that includes Web fonts is at:
Actually, the @font-face feature was part of the CSS 2.0 feature and was implemented in several browsers and plugins, including Netscape4, IE5 and Adobe SVG Viewer. The problem with these initial implementation was that each run-time supported a different font format. IE had dominant market share and might have succeeded in establishing its web font format, EOT (embeded OpenType, basically a subset of TrueType that is compressed using a special-purpose compression engine), but until recently the licensing restrictions on use of that web font format prevented other browsers from adopting it.
For various licensing, legal and techno-religious reasons, the browser vendors still haven't reached agreement on a single web font format that everyone can support, but there is reason for optimism that a standard web font format will emerge. With Firefox 3.6, Mozilla has invented a whole new font format, WOFF, that might be suitable for other browsers, and another format, CWT has been proposed. (Here is an article that discusses some of these issues.) SVG Fonts (i.e., fonts expressed using SVG's <font> and <glyph> tags) is a vendor-neutral and open format that browser vendors have to support to be SVG-conformant (and pass Acid3) that some browsers are already supporting on the HTML side. However, SVG fonts are verbose and don't include hinting and typically do not render as nicely at small sizes as hinted fonts, so are mostly useful for larger-size text.
