Web fonts took an interesting turn today with the news that Google is hosting fonts for use with @font-face:
Google Getting Into The Web Fonts Game
As was reported:
“I pulled up the source of the page and right there, on line 3, was a link element pulling in CSS from fonts.googleapis.com! The request is for a font called ‘Droid Sans’ in regular and bold.”
The Google IO event is taking place in San Francisco over the next couple of days so hopefully more details will emerge.
Web-Safe @Font-Face Fonts?
One source tells me that this might simply be an outgrowth of Google’s mobile strategy:
The Android only has the Droid families of fonts and this might simply be an easy and convenient way to make them accessible for developers. However, this would make the Droid families sort of the first ever universally available web-safe @font-face fonts. (If that designation makes any sense to you.)
But if Google starts hosting good quality screen fonts other than Droid…. but wait, we’ll see.
Just having Google floating around out there with this puts an interesting spin on things.
Update: It’s True! It’s True! Google Is Hosting Web Fonts
Looks like the real deal.
Details at:
http://code.google.com/apis/webfonts/docs/getting_started.html
And Paul Irish has a nice roundup of links at:
Details On The New Google Webfont Api
Microsoft: Take Note And Stop Being So Stingy
Hopefully, Microsoft – who spends untold amounts of money on all kinds of freebies to promote their products but for some reason nickles and dimes everybody by only making their basic fonts available through third-party for-pay font services like Ascender Corp – might see the light and follow suit.
For example, right now, you’ve already paid for the MS Cleartype fonts when you: 1) got Windows 2) got MS Office. And how many times have you paid for those over and over again over the years?
You want to use them as a web font? Gotta pay again!
Enough!
Why not make the Cleartype fonts universally available to everybody online? (Intelligently sub-setted, please.) Might be a smart PR move. Really.
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Hear hear. I’m currently distributing my CV as HTML and it’s petty that I shouldn’t be able to ensure it renders in Calibri and Cambria
On a serious note, I don’t think this is ever going to happen — much less that anyone at Microsoft is looking at this development and thinking they should in any way compete.
@barneycarroll
>I don’t think this is ever going to happen
Well, you never know. I’m not saying take it public domain or open source. Host it as a courtesy, at least. And make the license for those fonts eligible for @font-face embedding as long as you’re a licensed Windows/Office user. I don’t expect MSFT to allow them to be included in the next Linux distribution.
The Cleartype fonts exist on, probably, a good 60-70% of the machines out there now. Why not just bring it up to 99% via @font-face?
>much less that anyone at Microsoft is looking at this development and thinking they should in any way compete.
I disagree. They are very much looking to compete – as a defensive maneuver – but by proxy through companies like Ascender Corp. Fonts have been a great source of competitive advantage for them. Just my take. Maybe they really don’t care one way or the other. Windows has to have fonts, so MSFT has to get them made. Apple did an end-run around the problem with a “smart” rasterizer that makes off the shelf fonts look pretty good. And Safari was the first major browser to support @font-face. Slick!
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