WOFF 1.0: a milestone on W3C's journey of fonts on the web

Lammy

Article's history section neglects to mention Bitstream's TrueDoc Portable Font Resource format which was supported as a downloadable font standard by Netscape Communicator (4.x series). - Post-first-browser-war version of spec: https://web.archive.org/web/20040407162455/http://www.bitstr... - Natively supported in Netscape 4: https://web.archive.org/web/19970630083015fw_/http://develop... - And was available as an ActiveX Control for IE4: https://web.archive.org/web/19990421092859/http://www.truedo... https://web.archive.org/web/19990224045109/http://www.truedo... And despite being forgotten on Web still found a niche in various broadcast TV standards: “The PFR specification defines the Bitstream portable font resource (PFR), which is a compact, platform-independent format for representing high-quality, scalable outline fonts. Many independent organizations responsible for setting digital TV standards have adopted the PFR font format as their standard font format, including: - ATSC (Advanced Television Systems Committee) - DAVIC (Digital Audio Visual Council) - DVB (Digital Video Broadcasting) - DTG (Digital TV Group) - MHP (Multimedia Home Platform) - ISO/IEC 16500-6:1999 - OCAP (OpenCable Application Platform)” e: The linked 2022 retrospective does mention it in passing, but considering it shipped natively-supported in the #1 browser of the era I think it deserves to not be buried :) https://www.w3.org/TR/2022/NOTE-font-rationale-20220414/

altern8

Why is the new logo a stamp you find on some cheese wheels, like Parmigiano

interstingstuff

I just added WOFF2 fonts today to my page

nicoburns

WOFF2 is pretty cool. I recently ported the C++ woff2 library ( https://github.com/google/woff2 - as used by Chrome, Firefox) to Rust ( https://github.com/nicoburns/wuff ), and it turn out WOFF2 has a bunch of custom font-specific compression algorithms. WOFF1 is kinda boring from a technical perspective: it's just gzip in a font container.