W3C Invites Implementations of WOFF File Format 2.0

The WebFonts Working Group invites implementation of the Candidate Recommendation of WOFF File Format 2.0. Based on experience with WOFF 1.0, which is widely deployed, this specification was developed to provide improved compression and thus lower use of network bandwidth, while still allowing fast decompression even on mobile devices. This is achieved by combining a content-aware preprocessing step and improved entropy coding, compared to the Flate compression used in WOFF 1.0.

The Working Group has also published a Group Note of WOFF 2.0 Evaluation Report. Web Open Font Format (WOFF) 2.0 is a proposed update to the existing WOFF 1.0 with improved compression. This report lists requirements for successful deployment, evaluates how the requirement may be met, and examines the compression gains and tradeoffs vs. code complexity, encode and decode time. This document is non-normative.