Meet WOFF, The Standard Web Font Format

re: Meet WOFF, The Standard Web Font Format

Paul McKeown — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 17:53:51 GMT

Thank you, Microsoft. Genuinely appreciated. This will provide a straightforward technical solution to one of the most common of end-user request. 5 gold stars from me. May I buy a beer sometime for whoever it was in MS got behind this?

re: Meet WOFF, The Standard Web Font Format

Curious — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 17:41:43 GMT

Would it be possible to maliciously craft a font file so that when it's downloaded and used it causes a buffer overrun and potentially allow escalated privileges? Didn't this happen to Mozilla a few months back?

What steps are MS taking to prevent this, if it is possible?

re: Meet WOFF, The Standard Web Font Format

Sumit Pranav — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 19:15:21 GMT

A good step towards standardization.

re: Meet WOFF, The Standard Web Font Format

tom — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 07:39:43 GMT

Awesome that everyone is

working together on this.

re: Meet WOFF, The Standard Web Font Format

steve_web — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 02:38:43 GMT

Standards FTW! Awesome that everyone is working together on this.

re: Meet WOFF, The Standard Web Font Format

SC — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 16:34:38 GMT

HORRAY! This is one of the biggest announcements on the web in the past 10 years. FINALLY!!!!

re: Meet WOFF, The Standard Web Font Format

hAl — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 14:00:01 GMT

@Stephen

With EOT format that Micrsoft has been using since 1998 the font file consists of a subset of an OpenType fontset. The subset could be tailored to the website and contain a minimal amount of font characters thus making very small font files.

If for instance you would want your name only in a scriptlike font it would only take 12-13 characters in the compressed EOT file and not the entire OpenType scriptlike fontfile.

re: Meet WOFF, The Standard Web Font Format

Stephen E. Baker — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 12:40:14 GMT

@hal: WOFF provides compression. I'm not sure what you mean by subtypes, but the spec essentially says it's TrueType or OpenType + metadata compressed.

re: Meet WOFF, The Standard Web Font Format

Chris Lilley — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 12:22:24 GMT

@Grah good point and the working group charter has specific language in place to avoid it. Changes based on implementation experience are ok, radical redesign for no reason is right out.

@Wurst mojibake is typically a result of fonts being applied to ascii text to make it 'look like' soome other language. That won't happen with WOFF, which is Unicode based. If the browser does not support font downloading or does not support WOFF, you will see platform font fallback for the right characters (or a 'missing glyph').

@kl WOFF does not have DRM.

@hAl yes, you can do subsetting and yes, WOFF has compression.

re: Meet WOFF, The Standard Web Font Format

kl — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 17:13:45 GMT

Foundries should just grow up. Those layers of obfuscation don't protect fonts the least, because nobody even bothers to download them from pages, when all their fonts are available on PirateBay nicely packaged without DRM.

Making web authors life harder and adding more odd formats won't change that the least.

Music industry dragged us through numerous "PlaysForSure" failures before they learned their lesson. Do we really have to repeat all that pain with fonts?