Type on the web -- Report
by Eric Warner
Roger Black romped through 'type on the web' on Friday morning. No new news, and his 'slides' (what do you call these things these days?) are avalable to all on http://www.iab.com/atypi99.
Roger's point was that type on the web is stalled for a number of reasons, including
- the huge diversity of web browser/display 'standards', making it hard for designers to predict what users will see, unless they turn type into graphics.
- resistance from clients and engineers to the inclusion of embedded fonts in sites.
- slow progress in agreeing a standard for embedding fonts in web pages.
The result right now, he said, is
- most people use GIFs to display type
- Bitstream's embedding technology is here and Microsoft's is coming, though embedding is rarely used.
- Flash is here for special effects.
The future holds
OpenType, the superset of PostScript and TrueType which allows digital signatures (so you can track or prevent piracy). Roger showed a small picture of Adobe Tekton Pro, which he believed is the only actual OpenType font in existence (according the the slide, it's shipped with InDesign), containing lots of extra glyphs, ligatures and cleverness.
OpenType ends the platform/format wars: one high-quality format which works on everything (or, says this cynic, on nothing). Microsoft has announced Embeddable OpenType (known as WEFT). There are some OpenType useful links elsewhere on the site.
SVG - scalable vector graphics - is a standard which includes font descriptions and is being discussed by the WoldWide Web Consortium (W3C). Adobe and others are engaged on this standard. Roger believes the work is going too slowly, though a bunch of agitated type designers who gathered here on Thursday afternoon feel that SVG may endanger their ability to make a living by allowing too-easy use of fonts by folk who have not paid for them.
Roger made the interesting point that XML (Extensible Markup Language, which will solve all known problems and cause beautiful strangers to fall in love with you), though it doesn't really deal with font drawing on screen, is causing designers to start doing real typography on the web.
Last year we thouht that good type on the web was almost here. This year the story seems the same.
