Fonts, Fonts, Fonts!

One of my biggest gripes about internet architecture and HTML/CSS is the inability to embed fonts into webpages. A lot of times, customers come to us with a particular font in mind. Maybe its a font that adds to their brand or maybe its a font that the customer really likes. Sometimes it is an individualized font desired such as the Disney script for the Walt Disney Company or the Coca Cola script for the Coca Cola Company or even our own Sunny Day Online script above.

The problem? Well, for web programmers, it is a challenge to design websites around a font. Fonts are not "served" through the internet from servers, they are installed on a visitor's computer and called (loaded) by the individual browser being used (i.e. Internet Explorer, Chrome, etc.).

The solution? Currently, there is not a standard solution for the font problem. There was an initiative started a few years ago by Microsoft called Embedded Open Type in which a zipped (compressed) font file that only includes necessary characters can be embedded into the coding of a website and "served". This solution hasn't been widely adopted and is currently only supported by Microsoft Internet Explorer. It has been submitted several times to W3C (the web standard gods) and has been rejected. The W3C has promised to set up a working group to come up with a way to implement embedded fonts, but we haven't seen anything yet.

Flash? Flash is great and fonts can be embedded, but flash is a proprietary format owned by Adobe that requires a plug-in to the browser to work. A download that less sophisticated web users won't know how to accomplish or want to accomplish. There is also a downside for search engines. Search Engines such as Google and MS Live rely on text and "keywords" within the text to rank pages according to the amount of links they can find relating to the keywords on your site. Flash is not easily read by the search engines, therefore, it is important to include visible HTML text along with any flash application integrated into your website. In other words, you can have Flash in the design of your site, but the content needs to be text. The text has to have a font that is installed on the user's computer, therefore, we are back at square one.

The other hold up on embedded fonts comes from TYPESET powerhouses such as Adobe and Quark who are afraid of copyright infringements on the font designs that they own. In other words, if we embedded fonts into websites, and they became readily available to all, would they be worth anything. That question is yet to be answered.

We need to be the voice of reason for W3C and we need to make sure they get moving on embedded fonts.

Bert Bos
W3C/ERCIM
2004, Route des Lucioles, B.P. 93
06902 Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France
E-mail: bert@w3.org
Tel. +33 (0) 4 92 38 76 92

-Tim Whitfield

P.S. Thanks for all the well wishes that I have been getting while I recover from major surgery.

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