Rich Web Typography - Just around the corner?

It's 2006 and it still feels like we're in 1995 as far as fonts on the WWW go. Time has moved on, we've stopped calling it the WWW and just say the web now. It's integrated into the fabric of our lives, we don't think about what's happening when we access information, it's just something we rely on.

Fonts on the web haven't kept up with the pace of change, the fonts which can be used in web pages are still limited to what ships with peoples computers! When the tech is in place, I want to see web sites providing fonts just like they provide an image or a vector graphic at present ;)

There are ways we can get custom fonts into pages, but they are either tied to a specific browser or require the user to download and install the TrueType Font themselves as administrator of their PC beforehand. Other approaches use Adobe's Flash as the means of rendering Anti-Aliased fonts in a browser, sIFR 2.0 is one framework which takes this approach; it does gracefully display using standard XHTML if the Flash plug-in is not installed, so users should not see any Flash errors at least.

Another key point is that users and companies need fonts they are allowed to distribute, home users might not be able to afford to buy special fonts. This means home users will either have to make their own (a time consuming affair, even more so for Asian languages!), or just put up with the bog standard Helvetica and Times fonts which most Linux, Mac and Windows installs come with (you need to maintain the common denominator between systems right! ;) One popular community produced free font is Gentium, I've also been using DejaVu Sans, check them out!

There is already a way to pull in our fonts, take this CSS example I wrote from the W3C's CSS2 spec, (dropped this from the CSS2.1 spec though!):

/* Define Maxus font to be downloaded if needed */
@font-face
{
font-family: "Maxus"; src: url("maxus.ttf") format(TrueType)
}

The W3C gurus have been discussing fonts too. Here's what I can see needs to be prioritised to get this in place:

• Common browsers need to support a finalised spec, pure and simple.
• As fonts take a long time to make, there aren't as many great ones going for nothing as their could be, so that area needs some targeted work by a collection of vendors, Universities or designers etc.

As a side note, these developments could create a whole market for fonts to be licensed for use on a website, or given away free under a non-commercial licence to home users etc.

So to summarise, let's focus on the open CSS2 specification we have. Plan of action: Web authoring tools vendors like Adobe need to support it, the W3C to promote it and web browsers to implement the support! ... possible? Yes. Will it ever happen? If no better solution comes along first, I hope it will!