Web typography

Unlike traditional print-based typography (where the page is fixed once typeset), pages intended for display on the World Wide Web have additional technical challenges and – given its ability to change the presentation dynamically – additional opportunities.

When HTML was first created, typefaces and styles were controlled exclusively by the settings of each web browser.

However, Internet Explorer added support for the font downloading feature in version 4.0, released in 1997.

Released fonts include Arial, Courier New, Times New Roman, Comic Sans, Impact, Georgia, Trebuchet, Webdings and Verdana—under an EULA that made them freely distributable but also limited some rights to their use.

For several years, there were five generic families:[6] Sans-serif Serif Monospace Cursive Fantasy As of February 2024[update], the CSS Working Group of W3C proposes that systems specify a default font using ui tags;[8] as of the same date, these are not widely supported yet.

[9] A technique to refer to and automatically download remote fonts was first specified in the CSS2 specification, which introduced the @font-face construct.

Authors had to use the proprietary WEFT tool to create a subsetted font file for each page.

[11] In 2006, Håkon Wium Lie started a campaign against using EOT and rather have web browsers support commonly used font formats.

[12][13][14] Support for the commonly used TrueType and OpenType font formats has since been implemented in Safari 3.1, Opera 10, Mozilla Firefox 3.5 and Internet Explorer 9.

In 2010, the WOFF compression method for TrueType and OpenType fonts was submitted to W3C by the Mozilla Foundation, Opera Software and Microsoft, and browsers have since added support.

[19] By using a specific CSS @font-face embedding technique[20] it is possible to embed fonts such that they work with IE4+, Firefox 3.5+, Safari 3.1+, Opera 10+ and Chrome 4.0+.

The SVG fonts as independent format is supported by most browsers apart from IE and Firefox, and is deprecated in Chrome (and Chromium).

[30] That's now generally deprecated; the standard that most browser vendor agreed with is SVG font subset included in OpenType (and then WOFF superset, see below), called SVGOpenTypeFonts.

Linking to industry-standard TrueType (TTF) and OpenType (TTF/OTF) fonts is supported by Mozilla Firefox 3.5+, Opera 10+,[32] Safari 3.1+,[33] and Google Chrome 4.0+.

[35] The Web Open Font Format (WOFF) is essentially OpenType or TrueType with compression and additional metadata.

Another solution is using JavaScript to replace the text with VML (for Internet Explorer) or SVG (for all other browsers).