And then there's WOFF, which looks like the future. There's some debate as to whether IE9 will be supporting it - however one of the SVG demos I saw at the conference seemed to be using it, so it seems pretty likely.I actually had an interesting chat with the lead developer from TypeKit about the WOFF format, and a couple folks working on similar projects. The consensus seems to be that WOFF is basically Microsoft's EOT format, without the name 'Microsoft' next to it. If that's the case, it's a frustrating complication in an already complicated landscape.
EOTs are harder to copy. That's actually a plus, as far as getting foundries on board goes. Of course, if you are also supporting a bunch of browsers that don't speak EOT that's kind of lost.That's kind of a wash already -- there's such a mish-mash of formats that you will need at LEAST three copies of every font if you want to serve the major browsers, four if you want to cover mobile. Internally, that's what TypeKit does: they do browser detection and serve up the font that will work with the browser you're using. And for them, it makes sense -- they do that ugly work once and centralize it. It's also why (I think) they sigh and rub their temples whenever someone comes out with a New And Better Web Font Format.
@font-face {
font-family: 'YourFont';
src: url('YourFont.eot');
src: local('Your Font'),
local('YourFont'),
url('YourFont.woff') format('woff'),
url('YourFont.ttf') format('truetype'),
url('YourFont.svg#YourFont-Bold') format('svg');
}
You can see the above mentioned multiple file types... a pain in the ass, but you're only going to want to do this once or twice per site and there are tools that help. And they give you multiple levels of fallback here, including SVG and, should you have it installed, a local version of the font (both the fonts name and the postscript name have to be used... again, browser differences). H2, P {
font-family: YourFont';
}
...and there you go!What do the cats have to do with anything? That's literally insult to injury to any photographer who wonders why their work is treated as worth less than fonts by browser vendors.I think that the difference is all about timing. When the IMG tag and FONT tags were added, there were widely accepted cross-platform image formats, NO widely accepted cross-platform font formats, and fonts were usually consistently named on a given platform. The FONT tag let you specify what font (or font category) something would appear in, while the IMG tag let you specify a link to a media resource somewhere on the Internet.
My only grumble with this is that I was hoping it was a community effort to work on the MovableType blogging software. Alas. TheLeagueofMovableType is not about MT, and their blog runs on Tumblr. If only MT had the thriving third-party community that WordPress has.Yeah. MT went through a few cycles of open/closed/open/closed/pay/free/pay/free, and it took them a long time to come around to the fully dynamic 'cycles are cheap' approach that drives most labor-of-love low-traffic personal blogs. They lost the tinkery hobbyists to so-so GPL projects, and eventually the so-so GPL projects got good enough that midrange people started converting and the rest is history. They've since GPL'd the MT codebase, but I think they lost a huge amount of momentum and it would take a miracle to really regain their momentum outside of large corporate blogging environments.
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posted by xthlc at 12:42 PM on March 22, 2010 [1 favorite]