WOFF, WOFF2, and the Emmy that crowned web type
In 2021 the Television Academy gave the W3C a Technology & Engineering Emmy for font standardisation on the web. Among the recipients was the CEO of FontLab Ltd — a small, deeply satisfying acknowledgement that the work to make type travel cleanly across browsers, operating systems, and broadcast pipelines mattered enough to be celebrated alongside cinematography and sound design.
The Web Open Font Format started in 2009 with three names on the draft: Jonathan Kew (Mozilla), Tal Leming, and Erik van Blokland. They submitted it to the W3C in April 2010 and saw it reach Recommendation status by December 2012. The mechanism itself was elegant in its modesty — a thin wrapper around an OpenType file, a little metadata, zlib compression. The brilliant part was the agreement underneath: type foundries, who had reasonably refused to license desktop fonts for raw .otf web embedding, were willing to license WOFF. That trust was the real invention.
WOFF2 followed in April 2012. The team switched the compression to Brotli, developed by Jyrki Alakuijala and Zoltán Szabadka at Google. A delightful detail worth keeping: Brotli was designed for fonts first, and only later became the general-purpose web compression algorithm we use everywhere — RFC 7932 standardised it in July 2016. WOFF2 itself reached W3C Recommendation in March 2018.
The size numbers reward that work generously. Across the Google Fonts corpus, WOFF2 runs about 30% smaller than WOFF on average, and over 50% smaller for CJK fonts. A full Noto Emoji set as CBDT bitmap tables weighs in at 9 MB; the same set as COLRv1 plus WOFF2 lands at 1.85 MB. Every byte of that saving is delivered to readers on metered data plans, on slow networks, on devices that fit in a pocket.
What strikes you reading the story now is how much patient collaboration sits behind a single file extension. Mozilla, Adobe, Microsoft, Apple, Google, every type foundry that mattered, and the W3C had no obvious reason to converge on anything, and yet they did — through twenty years of conversation, draft after draft, edit after edit, and a long friendship between people who clearly care about letters.
Some agreements take a long time to land, and when they finally do, the result reads like a small miracle. WOFF and WOFF2 are exactly that. The Emmy was a lovely way to say thank you to everyone who carried the project across the line.