David Emery Online

Font Face

5 October 2007

The biggest browser news this week comes – as is becoming ever more frequent – from the WebKit team, as they’ve announced support for the @font-face CSS rules. The @font-face CSS rules allow web developers to specify fonts other then ones included on the users computer – which are a pretty restrictive set – so this is a great move, and perfectly timed just before Mac OS X 10.5 comes out. Hopefully this will ship near the end of the month with this addition intact, and they’re roll it out to Mac OS X 10.4 and Windows in the form of a final Safari 3 release too.

Web developers have long fought long and hard against the brick wall that is the limited font set that can be guaranteed to be on a users computer – you’re pretty much limited to Arial, Helvetica, Times, Courier, Verdana, Georgia, Comic Sans, Trebuchet, Arial Black and Impact. The most common way of getting round this limit is to make text as images in an image editor, but obviously this looses all sorts of things like being able to scale the text, easy editing and obviously causes problems with accessibility.

Another slightly more sophisticated solution that is becoming quite popular is sIFR, which allows you to use any font you like, embedded in a Flash file, then works some Javascript magic to replace text on the page with Flash versions in your specified font. It’s a nice solution for any text that is dynamic – and hence not able to be an image – but can be quite tricky to implement, and obviously relies on the user having Flash installed.

So, all in all this is a great thing, right?

Some people don’t seem to think so.

If you think this kind of argument sounds familiar, that’s because it’s exactly the kind of thing the music industry comes out with in regards to online sharing of music. It’s an incredibly short-sighted viewpoint, as there’s no way that download-able web fonts isn’t going to happen – web developers have been crying out for it for years and the wind is finally blowing in the right direction.

The font foundries are now going to go through exactly the same process the record labels have, including all the silly machinations around DRM and probably a bit of suing customers too. They’re going to have to face the fact that this is the reality of the world we live in – people can and will share your work without paying for it – and adjust their business model to fit. They’ll still be able to get paid by professional design agencies and the like, but maybe a move towards working for and closely with the big software houses like Microsoft and Adobe would make some sense.