WOFF 1.0: a milestone on W3C's journey of fonts on the web
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- WOFF 1.0's first public working draft was published on July 27, 2010, marking a key milestone in web fonts.
- Early web fonts faced licensing and DRM debates; the @font-face rule existed but no standard font format.
- Two proposals (ZOT from Mozilla and .webfont from Tal Leming and Erik van Blokland) merged into WOFF, which was DRM-free.
- WOFF 1.0's success led to rapid adoption of web fonts, and WOFF 2.0 later improved compression by up to 40% using Brotli.
- WOFF technology was also adopted in TV and broadcast standards, and the team received an Emmy award in 2022.
- Current work focuses on Incremental Font Transfer to improve latency and support for complex scripts like Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.