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

Chris Lilley, who was in the room for most of it, marks sixteen years since WOFF 1.0's first public release with the full history of fonts on the web: the early-1990s standardization arguments, the years when foundries and browser vendors wanted incompatible things, and the W3C process that finally got typographers and engineers to converge on a compressed, DRM-free format. The adoption curve did the rest, with web fonts reaching 80% of page loads by 2020. The piece closes with what is still unsolved: Incremental Font Transfer and better delivery for large-glyph-set scripts like Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. Timely reading here, since we spent last week tuning WOFF delivery on this very site; the format is old enough to feel like plumbing, and this is a reminder it was hard-won.