Web-safe Fonts: the Beginning of the End?

Web-safe fonts.

A nice, friendly-sounding phrase; it’s even got that comforting word “safe” in the middle.

But for web designers, that phrase is as comforting as a straitjacket. For print designers, finding out about web-safe fonts is like learning there’s no Santa Claus. And if you’re just someone who appreciates the beauty of typography, you may just be wondering why the web is so damn ugly.

It’s those web-safe fonts.

Since 1996, when Microsoft designated the web-safe font families in their “Core fonts for the Web” program, designers have been restricted to a tiny group out of the tens of thousands of existing fonts.

Not only that, but designers are forced to specify a replacement in case the desired font is unavailable, and a last-resort font-family (e.g. “sans-serif”) for the worst-case scenario. This means you can never test all possible appearances of a page without knowing what fonts are installed on the user’s machine. That doesn’t exactly encourage bold, innovative design.

Perhaps most offensive to some was the inclusion of Arial, Microsoft’s copyright-avoiding knockoff of Helvetica, which is perhaps the best-loved font in existence, and even the subject of a full-length film of the same name.

Basically, web typography sucks and web-safe fonts are an ugly, constricting anachronism. But the end may be near; the Holy Grail of rich typography for the web could be around the corner.

There have been numerous attempts to solve the problem of web-safe fonts before. First was plain old image replacement, which did the job for large logos and the occasional headline. But unless properly tagged, they sent no information to screen readers or search engines, the text could not be copied/pasted, and entire pages were out of the question.

Then there were embedded fonts (too big), SiFR (a slow, complicated Flash workaround with accessibility issues), DTR (relies on server-generated images, basically a fancy version of simple image replacement), FLIR (an attempt at a better SiFR), and others.

Today, Smashing Magazine reports on upcoming CSS3 support for custom web fonts with the @font-face tag. This calls a font from a specific URL to be used in the page, just like a call to a remote script or stylesheet.

Actually, this isn’t really news, since it was first proposed for CSS2 and has been growing in support for some time. Safari users are already seeing it, and it’s planned for the next major update to Firefox. As usual, Internet Explorer lags behind, in this case due to Microsoft’s insistence on using their own “Embedded OpenType” technology…sound familiar?

But thanks to the rapidly-growing adoption of better browsers, designers may start designing for the best-case scenario, with a back-up plan for the worst – not the other way around.

Usage licenses still apply of course, and there is the obligatory intellectual property debate among font creators. Discussion of a universal web type library has already begun. But there are more than enough fonts available right now to give our tired eyes a rest from the stalest of the web-safe fonts, like Tahoma and Trebuchet.

Which means a whole universe of fonts will soon be appearing all over the web – just maybe in this new year.

Better 12 years late than never.