The Web Open Font Format (WOFF) is a
font
In metal typesetting, a font is a particular size, weight and style of a typeface. Each font is a matched set of type, with a piece (a "sort") for each glyph. A typeface consists of a range of such fonts that shared an overall design.
In mod ...
format for use in
web
Web most often refers to:
* Spider web, a silken structure created by the animal
* World Wide Web or the Web, an Internet-based hypertext system
Web, WEB, or the Web may also refer to:
Computing
* WEB, a literate programming system created by ...
pages.
WOFF files are
OpenType
OpenType is a format for scalable computer fonts. It was built on its predecessor TrueType, retaining TrueType's basic structure and adding many intricate data structures for prescribing typographic behavior. OpenType is a registered trademark ...
or
TrueType
TrueType is an outline font standard developed by Apple in the late 1980s as a competitor to Adobe's Type 1 fonts used in PostScript. It has become the most common format for fonts on the classic Mac OS, macOS, and Microsoft Windows operating ...
fonts, with format-specific compression applied and additional
XML
Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing arbitrary data. It defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable. T ...
metadata added.
The two primary goals are first to distinguish font files intended for use as web fonts from fonts files intended for use in desktop applications via local installation, and second to reduce web font latency when fonts are transferred from a server to a client over a network connection.
Standardization
The first draft of WOFF 1 was published in 2009 by Jonathan Kew, Tal Leming, and
Erik van Blokland,
with reference conversion code written by Jonathan Kew. Following the submission of WOFF to the
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) by the
Mozilla Foundation,
Opera Software and
Microsoft in April 2010, the W3C commented that it expected WOFF to soon become the "single, interoperable format" supported by all browsers. The W3C published WOFF as a
working draft in July 2010. The
final draft was published as a
W3C Recommendation on 13 December 2012.
WOFF 2.0, with reference code provided by Google, has an improved compression scheme, using
Brotli
Brotli is a lossless data compression algorithm developed by Google. It uses a combination of the general-purpose LZ77 lossless compression algorithm, Huffman coding and 2nd-order context modelling.
Brotli is primarily used by web servers and ...
for byte-level compression, and became a W3C Recommendation in March 2018.
Specification
WOFF is a wrapper containing
SFNT
SFNT is a font file format which can contain other fonts, such as PostScript, TrueType, OpenType, Web Open Font Format (WOFF) fonts and other. SFNT stands for '' spline font'' or ''scalable font'', and was originally developed for TrueType fonts o ...
-based fonts (
TrueType
TrueType is an outline font standard developed by Apple in the late 1980s as a competitor to Adobe's Type 1 fonts used in PostScript. It has become the most common format for fonts on the classic Mac OS, macOS, and Microsoft Windows operating ...
or
OpenType
OpenType is a format for scalable computer fonts. It was built on its predecessor TrueType, retaining TrueType's basic structure and adding many intricate data structures for prescribing typographic behavior. OpenType is a registered trademark ...
) that have been compressed using a WOFF-specific encoding tool so they can be embedded in a Web page.
WOFF Version 1 uses the widely available
zlib compression (specifically, the compress2 function),
typically resulting in a file size reduction for TrueType files of over 40%. Since OpenType CFF files (with
PostScript
PostScript (PS) is a page description language in the electronic publishing and desktop publishing realm. It is a dynamically typed, concatenative programming language. It was created at Adobe Systems by John Warnock, Charles Geschke, Doug B ...
glyph outlines) are already compressed, their reduction is typically smaller.
Vendor support
Each version of the format has received the backing of many font vendors, also known as
type foundries, and has been supported by all major browsers:
*
Firefox since
version 3.6
*
Google Chrome
Google Chrome is a cross-platform web browser developed by Google. It was first released in 2008 for Microsoft Windows, built with free software components from Apple WebKit and Mozilla Firefox. Versions were later released for Linux, macOS, ...
since version 6.0
*
Internet Explorer since
version 9
*
Konqueror
Konqueror is a free and open-source web browser and file manager that provides web access and file-viewer functionality for file systems (such as local files, files on a remote FTP server and files in a disk image). It forms a core part of ...
since
KDE
KDE is an international free software community that develops free and open-source software. As a central development hub, it provides tools and resources that allow collaborative work on this kind of software. Well-known products include the ...
4.4.1
*
Microsoft Edge
*
Opera since version 11.10 (
Presto 2.7.81)
*
Safari 5.1
* other
WebKit-based browsers since WebKit build 528
WOFF 2.0, based on the
Brotli
Brotli is a lossless data compression algorithm developed by Google. It uses a combination of the general-purpose LZ77 lossless compression algorithm, Huffman coding and 2nd-order context modelling.
Brotli is primarily used by web servers and ...
compression algorithm and other improvements over WOFF 1.0 giving more than 30% reduction in file size, is supported in
* Google Chrome (since version 36),
* Edge (since version 14),
* Opera (since version 26),
* Firefox (since version 35)
* Safari (since version 10).
Some browsers enforce a
same-origin policy In computing, the same-origin policy (SOP) is an important concept in the web application security model. Under the policy, a web browser permits scripts contained in a first web page to access data in a second web page, but only if both web page ...
, preventing WOFF fonts from being used across different domains. This restriction is part of the
CSS 3
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language used for describing the presentation of a document written in a markup language such as HTML or XML (including XML dialects such as SVG, MathML or XHTML). CSS is a cornerstone techno ...
Fonts module, where it applies to all font formats and can be overridden by the server providing the font.
Some servers may require the manual addition of WOFF's
MIME type to serve the files correctly.
Since February 2017, the proper MIME type is
font/woff
for WOFF 1.0 and
font/woff2
for WOFF 2.0.
Prior to February 2017, the standard MIME type for WOFF 1.0 was
application/font-woff
, and some applications may still use the old type, though it is now deprecated.
See also
*
Web typography
Web typography is the use of fonts on the World Wide Web. When HTML was first created, font faces and styles were controlled exclusively by the settings of each web browser. There was no mechanism for individual Web pages to control font display ...
References
External links
Current specification of the WOFF 1.0 file formatat the
World Wide Web Consortium's website
Current specification of the WOFF 2.0 file formatat the
World Wide Web Consortium's website
{{DEFAULTSORT:Web Typography
Digital typography
Font formats
Typesetting
World Wide Web Consortium standards
Computer-related introductions in 2009