"It's been exciting to see font designers and vendors come together with browser developers and other industry experts to create a standard that will open up new typographic possibilities for web authors," says Jonathan Kew of Mozilla. "I anticipate that in the coming few years, the Web will be greatly enriched by the availability of a wide range of high-quality typefaces for many languages and all kinds of design needs."

Language support is just one of the many benefits of expanded font choice on the Web aside from making text prettier, clearer and in-line with branding. Since unique typefaces require the use of images to be displayed properly across the Web, the text is largely invisible to search engines. Removing the crutch of image-based typography will have a significant impact on to improving typographic search engine optimization (SEO).

Eliminating typographic images also opens to the door to increased accessibility to the blind, who rely on text-to-speech programs. Members of the Web Fonts Working Group will be participating in a panel discussion on the WOFF at the end of the week at TypeCon 2010 - a conference for typographic enthusiasts. If the current state of testing and interest says anything, we could see a much broader set of fonts throughout the Web very soon.

Photo by Flickr user stevekeys.

WebFont Loader

Google also worked with Typekit to develop an open source WebFont Loader, a JavaScript library that allows developers to easily integrate Web fonts into their Web products. Today, different browsers tend to treat web fonts very differently. As Google notes, Firefox, for example, will load a page and display the fallback font until the Web font is loaded. Chrome and Safari, on the other hand, won't display any text until the font is fully downloaded and Internet Explorer "sometimes won't render any content at all until the web font is available." This even works for older browsers like Microsoft's Internet Explorer 6. Developers can use the WebFont loader to access fonts from Google, as well as from Typekit and other vendors.

Google's font directory currently features 18 fonts (some with multiple variants), including the popular Droid fonts. For now, Google is only supporting Western European languages, but the company expects to offer support for a more diverse set of languages soon.

FontStruct is a simple to use Flash tool that uses pre-made shapes to allow people to assemble simple fonts. While it can't create the most sophisticated fonts, it can create some pretty cool ones. All fonts created using the FontStruct app must be licensed using a Creative Commons license, which means that anyone can download and use the fonts for free -- though only fonts licensed without the "No Derivatives" clause can be cloned and used as the basis of new FontStruct creations.

Below is a font created using FontStruct and embedded using their sharing widget that lets users spread fonts they've made via social networking sites and blogs.

FontStruct automatically packages fonts as TTF files and makes them available for download on a special font page where other users can vote on that font and leave comments. Of course, FontStruct also serves as a marketing tool for the professionally made, paid fonts that FontShop sells -- one of which is advertised on almost every page of the FontStruct site. Even so, FontStruct is a really neat web application that makes it easy for anyone to create a TrueType font for free.