Fonts may not exactly be the most glamorous of web technologies, but they represent one of the most important and one that has stagnated for a very long period of time. Things are finally moving in this area as well and new formats and standards are beginning to pop up. Now, Mozilla is throwing its hat in the ring with a new format called the Web Open Font Format (WOFF), which is linked to the OpenType and TrueType font formats. The upcoming Firefox 3.6 will add support for the new format that is beginning to see some adoption.

“In Firefox 3.5 we included support for linking to TrueType and OpenType fonts. In Firefox 3.6 we’re including support for a new font format – the Web Open Font Format. [...] The WOFF format originated from a collaboration between the font designers Erik van Blokland and Tal Leming with help from Mozilla’s Jonathan Kew. Each had proposed their own format and WOFF represents a melding of these different proposals,” John Daggett, a Mozilla contributor working on font support, wrote. “The format itself is intended to be a simple repackaging of OpenType or TrueType font data, it doesn’t introduce any new behavior, alter the @font-face linking mechanism or affect the way fonts are rendered.”

WOFF has two main advantages over the OpenType and TrueType font formats on which it is based. One big advantage is that the font is compressed so it eats up much less bandwidth than other raw font types. It is a type of lossless compression, so no details are lost in the processs, though the same results could be achieved by using standard HTML compression.

The second distinctive feature is the metadata font creators can add to the fonts. The data is optional and won't affect how the font behaves, but it can be used to track information relating to its use. Mozilla stresses that this is an open font format and the metadata isn't intended to be used as a security feature. Support for the font should make its debut in Firefox 3.6, as a large number of organizations has also expressed its support for the format. The Mozilla Hacks blog has a more detailed overview, as well as some usage examples, but they do require nightly builds of the upcoming Firefox 3.6.