[whatwg] Using fonts stored on servers

[Tab Atkins Jr.]

On Sat, Apr 3, 2010 at 2:31 PM, Ashley Sheridan
<ash at ashleysheridan.co.uk> wrote:
>
> On Sat, 2010-04-03 at 23:25 +0200, Onsemeliot wrote:
>
> Hi people,
>
> I hope nobody is offended if I start being a member of this group by asking for a feature in the new standard.
>
> I'm a web designer and try to stick to clear standards in order to get the best results on various systems, but I wonder why you don't implement the support of defining (at least) free font faces stored at any server.
>
> There is an old solution for this on Netscape 4.1 and IE 4, but no newer browser supports anything similar.
>
> I often work with very tight corporite design rules. They need to be implemented in all layout's, but it is always necessary to violate them on web pages because it is impossible to use specific fonts there without switching to images instead of using real text.
>
> Do you see any chance of supporting such a feature in the future?
>
> Bye for now
> Onsemeliot
>
> CSS3 has this in terms of font support, but it's just a wait for browsers to implement it or reject it I guess:
>
> http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-fonts/

All modern browsers support the @font-face declaration in CSS.  Even
IE6 and 7 do.  There is a slight wrinkle in that they accept different
formats, though.  IE only accepts fonts in the EOT format, while other
browsers accept fonts in the normal TTF format and possibly WOFF
format.  There are converters both online and downloadable to turn a
TTF font into an EOT very easily, and there are guides online about
how to safely and easily serve both types of fonts to both browsers
(you can't *quite* do what the CSS Fonts module says, because IE's
support is somewhat buggy).

So feel free to use webfonts on your website.  All your visitors will
be able to see them.

~TJ