‘Downloadable Fonts’ on the Web Gains Support

A few weeks ago David Hyatt, a member of the WebKit Open Source Project, announced the WebKit rendering engine now has the ability to download fonts to be used in web sites. This means web sites will be able to use any fonts a web developer chooses, not just the select few cross-platform fonts available now.

One of the more common frustrations traditional designers have with web design is lack of fonts. The only fonts that can be counted on across the millions of computer systems around the world are the ones that are installed by the operating system by default. This list gets even smaller when you consider different operating systems use different default fonts. In the end, there are only seven or eight fonts that are the same (or MOSTLY the same) across most computers. Even more frustrating is that all OSs have different ways of rendering fonts, so the same fonts may look differently on different systems.

(Personally, I view the lack of fonts online as a benefit. I don’t have to fret over an endless choice of typefaces for a design. I feel very strongly that some of the most creative solutions to problems are born out of constraints. Constraints can be liberating.)

The game seems to be changing, thanks to the latest builds of WebKit. WebKit is the rendering engine framework built into Mac OS X, and is used to power the Safari web browser (on Mac and Windows), the Mail.app email program, and dozens of other applications. It is also the browser engine built into Adobe AIR, the cross-platform web application environment. WebKit now allows a developer to make a reference to TrueType font files through CSS. The browser then downloads the entire font and uses them in a web page. The fonts aren’t actually installed on your computer, they are only kept temporarily in memory and browser cache. This means you can use any font you want, and you don’t have to worry about the user having it. A List Apart has a great article describing how it all works, along with tutorials and samples. And the samples work great in the latest builds of WebKit.

With this great power comes great responsibility. There’s no doubt this has the potential to be abused. How long will it be before web sites start to look like ransom notes, with different fonts for every headline and paragraph? Another thing to consider is font files can be large...sometimes megabytes in size. They could become a very large bandwidth tax. Also, not all fonts are free. In fact, the best fonts usually aren’t. Since downloading fonts in web browsers is new, it’s not clear how fonts should be licensed for this use.

The only thing keeping downloadable fonts from going mainstream is browser support. Opera is supposed to have it, but I haven’t seen it working yet. Internet Explorer sort of has it, but can only use Microsoft’s proprietary font format. Most other browsers, including Mozilla’s Firefox, don’t support it at all. Better fonts are here for WebKit now, but we’ll have to wait to use them while everyone else catches up.