WebFonts Working Group

[Levantovsky, Vladimir]

Dear all,

I am sure many of you know by now that W3C has recently established the WebFonts WG to develop and standardize the technology to enable browsers to download and temporarily install a font for rendering of web content. Historically, the mechanism to do it was developed as part of the CSS - what was lacking up until today is a single interoperable (and suitable for the web) font data format. The discussion was resumed back in 2007 when Microsoft and Monotype Imaging has jointly submitted the proposal to standardize Embedded OpenType (EOT). As a result of the discussions that followed EOT submission, the new proposal has emerged for a Web Open Font Format (WOFF) that has gained support among many browser and font vendors.

The draft WOFF specification was developed by Jonathan Kew (Mozilla), Tal Liming (Type Supply) and Erik van Blokland (LettError). Earlier this week, the official submission of this specification has been approved by W3C (http://www.w3.org/Submission/2010/03/), and it's important to notice that the submission has been sponsored by three major browser vendors Microsoft, Mozilla and Opera.

The WebFonts WG charter has been approved and the group is officially formed. The information about the group, its activities, planned deliverables and info on how to join the group is part of the group charter (http://www.w3.org/2009/08/WebFonts/charter.html). W3C members can join the group following the link in the group charter (you need to ask your W3C Advisory Committee representative to nominate you), for those of you who are interested to join the group and contribute to this important development but are not currently a W3C member - please read the information on how to join posted on the W3C font list (http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-font/2010JanMar/0044.html).

Please note that WOFF is a data format that is intended to encapsulate the existing TrueType and OpenType/OFF fonts. It also provides font compression capabilities and introduces both extended (public) metadata, which can be seen and exposed to an end-user by a web browser, and optional private metadata, which font vendors can use at their own discretion. The WG charter specifically mentions that changes to the OFF specification are out of scope of  WebFonts WG, and, if any need arises for such changes to be made, the group will communicate their requirements to the ISO/IEC JTC1 SC29/WG11 (i.e. the MPEG Committee and this group) via liaison relationship between ISO and W3C.

Thank you and regards,
Vladimir

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