Technical Hurdles
We don’t have a standard format for web fonts. There have been attempts but nothing has stuck.
So, what’s standing between us and a font utopia? Besides the political battles there are a whole mess of technical hurdles and features that need to be supported or at least considered.
What will the perfect web font format look like?
- Easy to use
- Web designers and developers don’t mind jumping through some hoops but the perfect web font needs to fit within our workflow. Don’t make us troubleshoot our fonts or wrestle with DRM that refuses to cooperate until we unregister a machine or call customer support.
- Backward compatible?
- Not necessarily. In a perfect world, we can start using web fonts right away. Our patience is waning and waiting another four years for browser penetration will be difficult. Then again, if the perfect future proof format is developed then making a clean break may be worth it. Also, rendering of web fonts on older browsers may be less than ideal—aliased fonts that were never designed specifically for the screen can be ugly and difficult to read on older versions of IE. We’ll continue using our hacks until the time it right.
- Compression
- Web fonts should allow some form of compression. Fonts are larger than you may think and web performance is an important issue especially for larger organizations with heavy traffic. The faster, the better.
- Render speed
- Again, performance is important. How can the render speed be optimized? What is displayed while the font is being downloaded? Does the web font substitute a web safe font? This substitution can be jarring. The web designer should be able to choose how the font is rendered—does the screen remain blank until the font is loaded or does it substitute a web safe font?
- Hosting options
- We should be able to host our own fonts if we choose, take advantage of a distributed network or use hosting service. The ideal format should be flexible enough to allow multiple hosting options. A hosting service could improve cacheing by serving the same file to multiple sites but we should be free to find other solutions.
- Security
- Finally, we all want web fonts but not at the cost of a whole new wave of exploits and bot nets. This may be an issue more for operating systems and browsers but we should avoid creating a new vector for attacks from hackers and if a little more caution is required in defining the web font standard then so be it.
The Web Fonts Series
- Part 1: An Overview of Font Embedding, Font Linking, & the Current State of Fonts on the Web
- Part 2: Stakeholders & Browser Support
- Part 3: Technical Hurdles
- Part 4: The W3C Fonts Working Group
- Part 5: Fonts Now!
Tags: web-fonts