W3C Starts Work on Universal Web Font Format

The World Wide Web Consortium's effort at regulating web space will be far from being final with the arrival of HTML5 and CSS3. While it will surely help make some sense from the multitude of standard variations, it will not put everyone at peace. W3C's most recent effort will be gearing toward standardizing a universal web font format for everyone to be able to use over the Internet.

The format, named WOFF (Web Open Font Format) will aim at replacing OpenType, TrueType, EOT, CFF and SVG, the current most used formats for web fonts on the web.

On March 18, 2010, W3C officially announced the birth of the Web Fonts Working Group, a committee geared toward developing a common format for web fonts to be used across the Internet in web pages on PCs, mobile devices and any other hardware specialized in viewing web documents.

The organization will not develop a completely new font format but will continue work on the existent WOFF one, already supported by the Mozilla Firefox 3.6 browser. The format is the result of the collaboration between font designers Erik van Blokland and Tal Leming, Mozilla employee Jonathan Kew assisting them.

WOFF is basically a simple compressed file format for fonts primarily for web usage. The format is built around the table-based sfnt structure used for similar web fonts like Open Font Format, TrueType and OpenType.

The compression used in WOFF the basic font data is subjected to allows the font to be smaller in size, while also having all the original features and advantages of the original. WOFF also permits font meta data and additional information to be stored separately from the raw font data.

In a real-world scenario, font suppliers will have to compress their fonts using WOFF compression tools. These fonts can then be used by web developers on their websites. The WOFF font will have to be stored on a server from where it will be served to users accessing a website using those fonts. Delivered to the user's computer, the WOFF format will be decompressed by the browser.

The W3C Web Fonts Working Group is expected to deliver the WOFF final specifications for all browser manufacturers and the typographic community along with WOFF test suites and an implementation report.

More information about the WOFF format can be found on Mozilla's specification page.

The W3C Web Fonts Working Group's official page can be found here.