Web Open Font Format
file format for fonts in web pages
The Web Open Font Format (WOFF) is a font format for use in web pages.
WOFF files are OpenType or TrueType fonts, with format-specific compression applied and additional XML metadata added.
The two primary goals are first to distinguish font files intended for use as web fonts from fonts files intended for use in desktop applications via local installation, and second to reduce web font latency when fonts are transferred from a server to a client over a network connection.
Standardization
The first draft of WOFF 1 was published in 2009 by Jonathan Kew, Tal Leming, and Erik van Blokland, with reference conversion code written by Jonathan Kew. Following the submission of WOFF to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) by the Mozilla Foundation, Opera Software and Microsoft in April 2010, the W3C commented that it expected WOFF to soon become the "single, interoperable [font] format" supported by all browsers. The W3C published WOFF as a working draft in July 2010. The final draft was published as a W3C Recommendation on 13 December 2012.
WOFF 2.0 significantly improved compression efficiency compared to WOFF 1.0, primarily through the introduction of Brotli, a new byte-level compression algorithm developed by Jyrki Alakuijala and Zoltan Szabadka. Brotli's effectiveness led to its widespread adoption, notably for HTTP content encoding. WOFF 2.0 was standardized as a W3C Recommendation in March 2018, with Google providing the reference implementation.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Web Open Font Format” as file format for fonts in web pages. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as file format for fonts in web pages. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 24, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q918221. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2009, 2010, 2012 and 2018.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Web Open Font Format” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.