Re: Webfont compression

John Daggett wrote:

> I was surprised that the issue of compression came up several times
> during the Typecon web fonts panel discussion [2] but no one pointed out
> that general gzip compression is available for all web content.  Several
> folks presented the somewhat distorted view that standard TTF/OTF fonts
> have to be served uncompressed while EOT fonts can be compressed.  This
> seems to be a persistent misconception.

Thank you for this comment, John, which goes some way to correcting such 
a misconception. For the sake of further clarity, and so we can better 
understand how this works, I wonder if you can provide some more detail. 
You say that general gzip compression is 'available' for all web 
content. In practical terms, how is this manifest? I understand that 
this compression is supported by default on the browser end, but how 
widely used is it on the server side, and what steps are necessary for 
web designers/developers wanting to ensure that such compression is 
applied to the sites that they build? I'm trying to understand whether a 
distinction exists between the availability of this technology and how 
much it is actually used.

John Hudson

Received on Wednesday, 22 July 2009 21:27:28 UTC