WOFF 1.0: a milestone on W3C's journey of fonts on the web
The W3C reflects on the 2010 release of the Web Open Font Format (WOFF), a key milestone in standardizing typography on the internet. The article details the historical challenges of font licensing and browser compatibility that preceded this standard.
Why it matters
WOFF fundamentally changed web design by enabling consistent, high-quality typography across different browsers and devices.
As part of a series to spotlight W3C technologies, their evolution and impact, as well as the people who work on them, W3C would like to take the opportunity of the 27 July of anniversary of the first public release of Web Open Font Format (WOFF) in 2010 to tell the story of a very interesting historical milestone on the decades-long road of W3C’s work on fonts on the web.
The invention of the World Wide Web has often been compared, in its world-changing impact on society, to the invention of the printing press in Europe. The pieces of moveable typeface used by Gutenberg helped to lead to a revolution in the sharing of information then, and Web Fonts have changed the way we now see and read text on the web, how we communicate; and they have literally changed the typographic face of the web.
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