#webfonts — Public Fediverse posts

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

https://www.w3.org/blog/2026/woff-1-0-a-milestone-on-w3cs-journey-of-fonts-on-the-web/

Comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49086890

#HackerNews #WOFF #W3C #webfonts #typography #webdevelopment #fonts

On the W3C blog "WOFF 1.0: a milestone on W3C’s journey of fonts on the web" by @svgeesus

Chris described the story of a very interesting historical milestone on the decades-long road of W3C’s work on fonts on the web.

https://www.w3.org/blog/2026/woff-1-0-a-milestone-on-w3cs-journey-of-fonts-on-the-web/

We invite you to support the community that develops web standards, the building blocks of our digitally connected world (like fonts on the web).
https://www.w3.org/support-us/
#GivingTuesday #WebFonts #AboutW3C

🖋️ KonghaYao/chinese-free-web-font-storage

Aggregates free Chinese webfonts via a custom CDN service. Uses character slicing technology to enable full site font coverage without polyfills.

⭐ Stars: 1421
📅 Last Update: Jun 23, 2026

https://github.com/KonghaYao/chinese-free-web-font-storage

#selfhosted #homelab #selfhost #selfhosting #opensource #fonts #webfonts

@randomMDN So... an attack vector for #cybersecurity hackers to poison the well of #webfonts with malice, isn't it? I do hope someone at #W3C understands security matters!

Andrew Bellamy from the Otherwhere Collective built Relay, a fontdrop website. It’s in beta stage and he asks for your feedback (via mail):

https://otherwherecollective.com/relay-beta/

#webfonts #variablefonts #fontdrop

@bram and @jmsole’s extremely thorough Fonts chapter of the Web Almanac is out: https://almanac.httparchive.org/en/2025/fonts

#Fonts #WebDesign #Webfonts

The Fonts chapter of the 2025 Web Almanac, by HTTP Archive, is now available

#webfonts

https://almanac.httparchive.org/en/2025/fonts

Started the first non-work day of the year with some yak-shaving on my website: learnt how to use local web fonts, picked one (Literata), changed some colors and removed the Google Programmable Search Engine and Google Analytics.

Webpages are now pure HTML/CSS (zero JS) and literally a few hundred bytes in size total.

https://codeyarns.com/tech/2026-01-01-how-to-self-host-google-fonts.html

#webfonts #googlefonts

@cjtype @pixelambacht There is a little more activity.

1. This demo:
https://garretrieger.github.io/ift-demo/

2. The full source for the demo, including the client-side and server-side parts:
https://github.com/garretrieger/ift-demo

3. An IFT encoder, work in progress
https://github.com/w3c/ift-encoder

4. Recently we heard that a Japanese foundry, Studio株式会社 was working on an encoder and decoder (not released yet, but good news)
https://www.w3.org/2025/11/10-webfonts-minutes.html
https://studio.inc/

#webfonts #IncrementalFontTransfer

The @w3c Web Fonts Working Group has updated the Incremental Font Transfer (IFT) specification.

All the things that an encoder or a client (decoder) must do are explicitly called out, to make testing easier.

#webfonts #fonts #IncrementalFontTransfer

https://www.w3.org/TR/2 025/CRD-IFT-20251118/

Dear #LazyWeb:

Is there still a good reason to have separate "Web Font" file formats vs Desktop? Like, if I can load an OTF font in my CSS, what purpose does this distinction serve? Is this just standards proliferation, or some sort of parallel development with different priorities?

#fonts #webfonts #otf #woff #ttf #truetype

Fonts:

In your web projects, do you usually use web fonts, do you prefer system fonts, or do you leave it up to chance if fonts are available? (That is, you declare fonts a user may or may not have.)

(Please boost if you’re curious about a bigger picture.)

#fonts #webfonts #typography #performance

Do I have typography experts somewhere in my reach? It has happened a few times to me, that while I work with ripped fonts for making a design, their leading was quite normal, but when working with the actual font-files from the foundry, they seem to be severely overextended, even reaching out of their characters bounding box.

Is this some sort of regularity in the way that fonts are designed for print or something? Or is that a mistake?

#typography #webdesign #webfonts #css #design

We also have an explainer, which is shorter and easier to read than the actual specification:

https://github.com/w3c/IFT/blob/main/IFT-Explainer.md

#webfonts

Incremental Font Transfer is now an @W3C Candidate Recommendation.

IFT defines a method to incrementally transfer a font from server to client. The client loads only the portion(s) of the font that they actually need, significantly reducing data transfer. Multiple incremental additions to the same font are possible, such as a user agent updating a font as a user browses multiple pages.

https://www.w3.org/TR/IFT/

#webfonts

Don’t rely on Google Fonts for hosting type: https://pimpmytype.com/google-fonts-hosting/

#dependencies #webdesign #fonts #typography #frontend #ui #webFonts #GoogleFonts #Google

For the enthusiastic, who want to go beyond a canned demo: it is all on GitHub

https://github.com/garretrieger/ift-demo

There is a client (in rust, transpiled to wasm) with brotli, harfbuz and woff2 support; the sample texts are in a json file so you can edit them or add your own.

Initial font subset, and the various patches, use a mixed (glyph and table keyed) encoding as described here

https://github.com/w3c/ift-encoder/blob/main/docs/experimental/closure_glyph_segmentation.md

and the implementation is also on GitHub

https://github.com/w3c/ift-encoder/tree/main

#webfonts

The @w3c WebFonts working group now has a fully functional Demo of Incremental Font Transfer which compares IFT to normal font loading with Unicode-range static subsetting. Just click on "next text sample" to see the font being upgraded in real time to support more writing systems and more font variation axes. There is a running total of bytes transferred, you can see that IFT loads much less data.

Both CFF2 and glyf fonts are used in the demo.

https://garretrieger.github.io/ift-demo/

#webfonts

🚀 Oh, joy! Yet another groundbreaking revelation: web fonts now need #protection from the *big bad memory wolves*! 🐺💻 Meanwhile, the rest of us are left pondering: did someone just reinvent the wheel, or did the Chrome team just discover fire? 🔥🌐
https://developer.chrome.com/blog/memory-safety-fonts #webfonts #memorymanagement #Chromeinnovation #reinventingthewheel #technews #HackerNews #ngated

Memory Safety for Web Fonts

https://developer.chrome.com/blog/memory-safety-fonts

#HackerNews #MemorySafety #WebFonts #ChromeSecurity #DeveloperTools #TechNews

Thinking about the wasteful nature of #LLMs got me thinking about waste in my own development. While it can be convenient to use the large, enterprise-grade frameworks to deliver a minimalist website in 2025 - it's absurd.

Do I really need #laravel with #react, #jquery, #tailwind, #webFonts, #postgres to host some simple #markdown?

Do I need to re-render a bunch of static content at every hit? Does every simple article require 64 connections to the server to display?

I think not.

I want my material to be available to anyone who wants it - regardless of the device they are using or the robustness of their connection.

I want to respect users who disable #javascript for their personal protection.

I want to respect #ScreenReaders and users of assistive technology, without unnecessary complexity.

Everything we need is built into the HTML and CSS specs.

Using some of my mana inside ye olde StackOverflow to get an answer to whether a web font can be interrogated as to whether it has a particular character. Already 2 interesting answers added to an older question. #webdev #typography #webfonts https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9005580/how-to-check-if-the-font-has-a-symbol/79435970#79435970

Ich hab mal ein Überblicksvideo zu Web-Fonts gemacht, was es da gibt (z.B. Variable Fonts) und wie man die performant und zugeschnitten verwenden kann (Subsetting, Preload-Hints und Format-Konvertierung):
https://youtu.be/6AxuFn0W3Ok

#webdev #frontend #webfonts #typography #webtypography #tutorial #subsetting