Hallelujah, Microsoft!

Microsoft has joined Mozil­la (and Opera, if it mat­ters) in spon­sor­ing the Web Open Font For­mat (WOFF) as a stan­dard with the World Wide Web Consortium.

This comes at the end of more than ten years of fight­ing between Web brows­er mak­ers over dynam­ic font for­mats, none of which worked on a plu­ral­i­ty of browsers. 

A legacy of conflict

The clos­est we came was back in 1997 to 1998 with Netscape 4’s sup­port for Bit­stream’s True­Doc web font for­mat. There was an ActiveX com­po­nent that could be placed in web­pages for sup­port in Inter­net Explor­er, though that worked only for Win­dows ver­sions of IE (remem­ber, that was back when Microsoft made a brows­er for the Mac). Microsoft still sup­port­ed their own tech­nol­o­gy but did­n’t do any­thing to stop the ActiveX com­po­nent from work­ing in Inter­net Explor­er. It was imper­fect, but there was for a short time sup­port for down­load­able fonts in Netscape on Mac, Win­dows, and Lin­ux, and on Inter­net Explor­er for Windows.

That all went down the drain when Netscape was bought by AOL, the Mozil­la group went inde­pen­dent and start­ed mak­ing what would become Fire­fox, and dropped all sup­port for Web­fonts. Bit­stream’s code for True­Doc is not open source, so the Mozil­la project could not include it in Mozil­la unless Bit­stream released their code, which Bit­stream did not.

Microsoft went on with their Embed­d­a­ble Open­Type tech­nol­o­gy, but because it was not adopt­ed by oth­er browsers it nev­er caught on. Web design and devel­op­ment is still an over­whelm­ing­ly non-Microsoft game, with design­ers pre­dom­i­nant­ly using Mac­in­tosh, devel­op­ers most­ly using Lin­ux or Mac, and the major­i­ty of web­servers run­ning Apache on some form of Lin­ux or Unix. By exclud­ing most of the peo­ple that would use the tech­nol­o­gy to build web­sites, Microsoft essen­tial­ly locked itself out.

Web typography, the next next generation

WOFF was devel­oped by Mozil­la with the sup­port and par­tic­i­pa­tion of promi­nent type font providers, and has been endorsed by Font­Font and typo­graph­ic leg­end Erik Spiekermann.

With Microsoft get­ting on the WOFF band­wag­on along with the sup­port for WOFF in the Gecko engine (Fire­fox), we have the mak­ers of the browsers 85% of the peo­ple use agree­ing on a stan­dard. Get­ting Webkit on board for the remain­ing browsers (includ­ing most cell­phone browsers) should­n’t be too hard con­sid­er­ing that the invest­ment in time, ener­gy and mon­ey will be reward­ed with a sig­nif­i­cant step for­ward in the brows­ing expe­ri­ence for users. 

Microsoft­’s move is a wel­come sur­prise con­sid­er­ing that it means a sur­ren­der in their push for the adop­tion of their own EOT tech­nol­o­gy. Coop­er­at­ing with Mozil­la on this is a depar­ture from Microsoft­’s his­to­ry of insist­ing it is the only play­er on the field, and uni­lat­er­al­ly cre­at­ing defac­to standards.

Playing well with others

Microsoft has a sig­nif­i­cant pres­ence on the World Wide Web Con­sor­tium, mak­ing their past behav­ior all the more baf­fling. «We make the rules and then ignore them» just does­n’t make any sense. In the last year, much has changed. Now Microsoft is fac­ing com­pe­ti­tion in the brows­er wars on two fronts, Mozil­la and WebKit. Webkit browsers com­bined only account for about 15% of Web traf­fic, but backed by Microsoft rivals Apple and Google, WebKit would be ignored at Microsoft­’s peril.

Since Chris Wil­son (Microsoft) stepped down as co-chair of the W3C and was replaced by Paul Cot­ton (Microsoft) and Maciej Sta­chowiak (Apple) last year, Microsoft has tak­en big steps fos­ter­ing open stan­dards at the W3C. By adopt­ing SVG (Scal­able Vec­tor Graphics—a W3C stan­dard that com­petes with Flash; Adobe was a big SVG backer until they bought Macro­me­dia) and just today announc­ing their sup­port for WOFF (Web Open Font For­mat) Microsoft is sig­nal­ing that it won’t hold back progress over a turf war, at least this time.

Since Microsoft has also announced sup­port for HTML5, pret­ty soon IE users will have access to a rich, dynam­ic Web expe­ri­ence cur­rent­ly avail­able only on non-Microsoft browsers. I don’t know how many of these great tech­nolo­gies will make it into Inter­net Explor­er 9, but if Microsoft is seri­ous about pro­mot­ing these them, web­site devel­op­ers will have access to pow­er­ful tools for mak­ing the Web as use­ful and as enter­tain­ing as it can pos­si­bly be. 

Until then, we’re liv­ing with an infor­ma­tion super­high­way on which half of the roads you dri­ve on the left and on the oth­er half you dri­ve on the right. The solu­tion isn’t putting steer­ing wheels on both sides of the car, the solu­tion is get­ting every­one to agree on one side. Microsoft deserves props for help­ing move for­ward the state of the art.