Web Fonts then and now (and what WOFF2 has to do with it)

It’s fair to say that web fonts have become the mainstream technology on the web, but it didn’t happen overnight and not without effort. This presentation will offer some historical perspectives on how and why things happened, how technical developments influenced the adoption of custom fonts on the web and in digital ads, and how the web fonts adoption defined the new features of the Web Open Font Format 2.0 (WOFF2) technology. We will discuss what makes WOFF2 such an efficient web font compression format, how content-aware data transforms contribute to overall increase in compression efficiency, why WOFF2 can still be considered a lossless compression (even though the input and output font files may not be a binary match) and how the WOFF2 adoption is going to improve the web user experience. Presentation: typotalks.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/WOFF2-TYPO_Labs-canned.pdf