Real typography on the web has been as elusive as a shadow at night. One of the brightest web designers, Jeff Veen and his cohorts at Small Batch, aim to change all that with Typekit. Veen thinks modern web browsers have matured to a level where cascading stylesheet (CSS) support is sufficient to specify and render type properly.
The W3C web fonts module for the CSS 3 specification has been available since 2002, but until recently none of the major browsers could link to a font file. Now, all of the major browsers—except Internet Explorer—support this function. And Typekit incorporates support for using Microsoft’s embedded OpenType (EOT) file format as a last resort for Internet Explorer. As Veen writes, “No longer will you need to trap your content in images or Flash just to express yourself visually. Pages will be more usable, accessible, and indexable. This is a massive upgrade for the web.”
A Panglossian web designer would specify type in CSS, link to the appropriate font file, and off she’d go. Except that most typefaces are protected by copyright and aren’t licensed for use on the web. Full stop. Typekit hopes to serve as a licensing intermediary to host type and provide a way of solving browser differences in how they handle type. Veen says that an added line of JavaScript (and a license fee, of course) is all that’s required. Reserving final judgement until the system actually ships, Typekit certainly sounds a lot easier to implement than the current alternatives.
Veen expands a bit on how Typekit will theoretically work in a second weblog post. An appliction programming interface (API) will be available and users will be able to link to a hosted CSS file containing the typeface declarations. Veen also hints that he’s open to serving the font files directly.
There are lots of questions: what’s the licensing structure going to look like and how well will Typekit scale are the big ones. Want to see Typekit in action? I’m pretty sure Veen’s personal site is using it.
There are two big problems with Typekit: Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and not a single type foundry has announced support for Typekit. We’ll win the first; Micrsoft will either fix Internet Explorer—it doesn’t support HTML 5 either—or the internet will route around it. The second is up for grabs. We need real type from real foundries; they’ll either follow the recording industry into oblivion or wake up and realize they’re sitting on an untapped—and potentially very lucrative—market.
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