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Internet Explorer 9.0 & ‘Web Open Font Format’

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CIOL Bureau
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BANGALORE, INDIA: ‘Font’ is a representative of creative presentation of characters. In fact, ‘Font’ provides life to character representation as being perceived by a graphic artist or designers. Etymology of font too indicates the evolution that it has gone through ever since a type writer was discovered.

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During the early nineties, at the time when World Wide Web was making its mark, the type of font available was limited to what was being offered or bundled with a specific browser. The markup or the web styling too was nascent at that point of time. This aspect of enabling choice of selecting a font was introduced as part of Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) 1.0 & Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) 1.0.

The interesting aspect about font is the journey it has taken in the context of the web. At the time when CSS 1.0 was introduced, there were certain fonts which were termed as web safe fonts. These are the fonts that were present on a wide range of computers and used by web content authors. Web typography is the term associated to web fonts.

The next generation of new fonts that were created was enabled for download. If a font that was mentioned as part of the markup was not present, then an install of the font was initiated, failing which the rendering was done with a fallback/web safe font. This was standardized in CSS 2.0. The fonts were referred to a True Type Fonts (TTF) or Open Type Fonts.

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With time, it was realized that as new fonts took birth on the web, it was not practical to enforce installation as and when the same was created by designer & content authors. The need of the hour was to enable a capability to package a font along with a web page, in a manner that is viable to be embedded. In addition, as a standard body, W3C thrives to introduce specifications & define standards for WWW.

This marked the genesis of ‘Web Open Font Format’ abbreviated as WOFF. WOFF is a font format meant to be used in Web pages, and was defined as recently as 2009. The font format, ably supported by Mozilla Foundation, Opera Software ASA & Microsoft, is on its way to becoming an interoperable format supported by all browsers.

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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');    

 } 

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@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);

 }

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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)

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