WOFF 1.0: a milestone on W3C’s journey of fonts on the web

As part of a series to spotlight W3C technologies, their evolution and impact, as well as the people who work on them, W3C would like to take the opportunity of the 27 July of anniversary of the first public release of Web Open Font Format (WOFF) in 2010 to tell the story of a very interesting historical milestone on the decades-long road of W3C’s work on fonts on the web.

The Early Web

The invention of the World Wide Web has often been compared, in its world-changing impact on society, to the invention of the printing press in Europe. The pieces of moveable typeface used by Gutenberg helped to lead to a revolution in the sharing of information then, and Web Fonts have changed the way we now see and read text on the web, how we communicate; and they have literally changed the typographic face of the web.

High level thinking about fonts on the web had started soon after the founding of the Consortium in 1994. In 1996 I wrote a Rationale for Fonts on the Web and in 1997, the W3C Fonts Working Group released the first public draft of Web Fonts to provide “greater typographic richness for HTML pages” and improve “the internationalization of the Web”.  This standardized the means to link to a font (@font-face) which would be used on a web page without installation. But it did not mandate a font format, and licensing issues were not addressed.

If we build it, will they come?

The CSS WG adopted @font-face into CSS2 in 1998. But for over ten years, Web Fonts were barely used. Fierce technical discussions centered around licensing, encryption, “root strings” to tie a font to a specific website, font obfuscation and even full-fledged Digital Rights Management (DRM), which seemed to some to be needed to protect against widespread piracy. Meanwhile browser vendors were wary of their potential legal liability simply downloading a font and rendering a website with it.