The Web Open Font Format (WOFF) is a
font format for use in
web pages.
WOFF files are
OpenType or
TrueType 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 data. It defines a set of rules for encoding electronic document, documents in a format that is both human-readable and Machine-r ...
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
Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...
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
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web. Founded in 1994 by Tim Berners-Lee, the consortium is made up of member organizations that maintain full-time staff working together in ...
on 13 December 2012.
WOFF 2.0 significantly improved compression efficiency compared to WOFF 1.0, primarily through the introduction of
Brotli, a new byte-level compression algorithm developed by Jyrki Alakuijala and Zoltan Szabadka. Brotli's effectiveness led to its widespread adoption, notably for HTTP content encoding. WOFF 2.0 was standardized as a W3C Recommendation in March 2018, with Google providing the reference implementation.
Each version of the format has received the backing of many
type foundries.
Specification
WOFF is a wrapper containing
SFNT-based fonts (
TrueType or
OpenType) 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 glyph outlines) are already compressed, their reduction is typically smaller.
Browser support
Major web browsers support WOFF:
*
Firefox since
version 3.6
*
Google Chrome since version 6.0
*
Internet Explorer
Internet Explorer (formerly Microsoft Internet Explorer and Windows Internet Explorer, commonly abbreviated as IE or MSIE) is a deprecation, retired series of graphical user interface, graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft that were u ...
since
version 9
*
Konqueror since
KDE 4.4.1
*
Microsoft Edge
Microsoft Edge is a Proprietary Software, proprietary cross-platform software, cross-platform web browser created by Microsoft and based on the Chromium (web browser), Chromium open-source project, superseding Edge Legacy. In Windows 11, Edge ...
*
Opera
Opera is a form of History of theatre#European theatre, Western theatre in which music is a fundamental component and dramatic roles are taken by Singing, singers. Such a "work" (the literal translation of the Italian word "opera") is typically ...
since version 11.10 (
Presto 2.7.81)
*
Safari
A safari (; originally ) is an overland journey to observe wildlife, wild animals, especially in East Africa. The so-called big five game, "Big Five" game animals of Africa – lion, African leopard, leopard, rhinoceros, African elephant, elep ...
5.1
* other
WebKit-based browsers since WebKit build 528
WOFF 2.0 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, preventing WOFF fonts from being used across different domains. This restriction is part of the
CSS 3 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
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
{{W3C standards
Digital typography
Font formats
Typesetting
World Wide Web Consortium standards
Computer-related introductions in 2009