Fonts on the Web… Finally?

In the early days of the Internet, there was only text. Everything was rendered in a default system font. As the usage of personal computers grew, so did the selection of fonts on computers. At the same time, the Internet was growing in popularity, and people saw value in online marketing. This is where the problem was born. The Internet was built to transmit information, but there were no specifications for how that information should be displayed. You could specify a font to use, but that would only work if the users had that font installed already. The accepted solution at that time was to create images when the font wasn’t available.

This solution worked great until search engines came along and tried to index the content. If your site used the above image based technique, all the search engines saw was a giant blank page, so they moved along. At this time, Cascading Style Sheets or CSS was gaining in popularity, and allowed developers to control much of the type rendering. Unfortunately, they were still stuck with the Web-safe fonts. These fonts—Arial, Courier New, Georgia, Times New Roman, and Verdana—are still used today as the core Web fonts.

As technology progressed, alternative solutions were proposed. Some based on Flash, which slowed the browser, and were limited to headlines. Others were based on JavaScript, and tried to emulate the desired font. The problem is that these are just stop-gap solutions. None of them work like a true font, and they pride themselves on being “close enough”.

The end goal has always been native fonts in the browser. Finally, an upcoming revision to the CSS specification aims to solve this problem once and for all. This spec—dubbed CSS3—allows for a font to be downloaded into the browser for displaying the Web site. Currently, Safari is the only browser to support this feature, but new versions of Firefox and Opera being released this year will include support as well. As always though, we’ll make sure everything gracefully degrades to non supporting browsers.

With the technology finally evolved enough to make font embedding on the Web a reality, the discussion is turning to the font houses and licensing issues. Many font houses have already included Web support, and some are introducing different terms for online use. The good news is that everyone finally agrees that we’re close enough to have a real discussion on how to make it work.

Since 2009 looks to be the year font choice returns to the Web, our creative minds wanted me to point out that subtle is always better.