Web Open Font Format backed by Mozilla, type foundries

“Efforts to bring advanced typography to the Web have reached an
important milestone. Type designers Tal Leming and Erik van
Blokland, who had been working to developing the .webfont format,
combined forces with Mozilla’s Jonathan Kew, who had been working
independently on a similar format. The result of the collaboration
is called Web Open Font Format (WOFF), and it has the backing of a
wide array of type designers and type foundries. Mozilla will also
include support for it in Firefox 3.6.

“WOFF combines the work of Leming and Blokland had done on
embedding a variety of useful font metadata with the font resource
compression that Kew had developed. The end result is a format that
includes optimized compression that reduces the download time
needed to load font resources while incorporating information about
the font’s origin and licensing. The format doesn’t include any
encryption or DRM, so it should be universally accepted by browser
vendors—this should also qualify it for adoption by the
W3C.”

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