Internet Explorer 9.0, slated for beta release in September, has embraced WOFF and provides the much required support. Since this is a W3C advocated standard, other browsers would soon follow. The IE 9.0 Platform Preview 4 that was released a while ago has a showcase of the power of WOFF. Navigate to http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/ to install Platform Preview 4 and check out the ‘Web Fonts’ showcase.

As per W3C, WOFF has been designed to provide a lightweight, easy to implement font data, which is compressed using zLib compression. This is supposedly a wrapper on top of TTF and Open Type fonts packaged for efficient usage & delivery on the web. The WOFF based fonts are packaged or linked to web pages by means of CSS @font-face rule as shown below.

@font-face {
  font-family: FelbridgeOTSCondensed;
  src: url('fonts/FelbridgeOTS-Condensed.woff');    
 } 

@font-face {
  font-family: ITCGrimshawHand;
  src: url('fonts/GrimshawHand.woff');
 }

And are referenced in CSS styles as below:

#title {
  font: 30pt ITCGrimshawHand;
  color:rgb(205,254,255);
 }

Earlier, once a font was installed on a particular machine, it was available to all web pages or documents for usage irrespective of whether they referenced them or not. Now with CSS 3.0 & WOFF, once downloaded as part the web page, is only available to the reference page and not outside its context.

WOFF is perceived to be light weight, compressed font format designed for web. This spawns an evolution of next generation fonts to be delivered over web without the hassle of font installation. With IE9 Platform Preview, timely and just-in-time download of fonts restrictive to the context of the document/web page is on the offering, though the installation of true type fonts continues from a standards perspective. IE 9 Platform Preview enhances existing support for CSS fonts by embracing CSS3 fonts module & WOFF.

(The author works for Developer & Platform Evangelism group @ Microsoft Corporation as an Enterprise Architect Advisor. He can be reached @ saalur@microsoft.com)