Interesting, it appears to be serving @font-face fonts with browser-specific stylesheets. Firefox gets a tag with src: local('name'), while IE doesn't. More details here: http://code.google.com/apis/webfonts/docs/technical_consider...

This server-side logic makes it more than just a font-face repository like I initially assumed. If you feel like rolling your own and not using Google's, you can easily download font-face kits from fontsquirrel.com.

A very important advantage is that the browser can cache the stylesheet and the font, and can reuse them across multiple websites.

So if your website uses a font that is used by another website which the user has already visited, the browser doesn't need to download the font again. It doesn't even need to check the modification date on Googles server.

As many fonts add ~100 KB to the download size for a page, this really makes a difference.

Took me one minute to implement. Amazing. The Droid Sans font looks great on headers, using it already. Always wanted to use Typekit but too cheap to pay the costs, this works for me.

Link? Would love to see it...

I think he meant on your site...

Probably, it was for our work site and I don't really want to link ecommerce sites here, don't think it's kosher.

By using the link in your site you will give googles servers a nice log of as many pages on your internal server as your users go to :)

What? So? The ecommerce site is public for any user .. don't see the issue :-)

I'm glad to see some more of the common pieces of the internet hosted more centrally. There are issues with one company being in control of these things, but we gain a lot of benefits by having standard fonts and libraries available. These benefits include better caching and ease of patching.

Having a centralized structure will help in pushing adoption, but I feel like we should make sure that once we have acceptance, we don't become dependent.

Sweet. Looks pretty easy to implement. http://code.google.com/apis/webfonts/docs/getting_started.ht...

It'll be awesome if google hosts non-romanized script fonts, too. Many sites in other languages require you have a certain font on your machine.

Here's a good example of a font Google should add -- Saab, a Gurmukhi (Punjabi) font. http://guca.sourceforge.net/typography/fonts/saab/ (free, gpl'd, unicode 4.0, opentype)

I think I found a bug. That is, a Safari bug that can be worked around by other means. I tried using Cardo (only available as TrueType) on a site I'm building, and it renders inconsistently in Safari (Mac), cutting off lines of type at random heights.

This seems to be a TrueType bug in Safari that can be circumvented by using OpenType or SVG, which I discovered can be easily prepared with this excellent little tool: http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fontface/generator

I ended up opting for my own @font-face linkage with the multiple formats converted by the aforelinked, which seems to render much better across browsers.

Shouldn't be hard for Google to implement something like this, though.

Any thoughts on why Google is doing this other than a perverse will to take over the entire Internet?

My thought is that they're hoping this will encourage more text instead of images as text. That helps them index more information and collect more data on the whole web.

Microsoft (and Apple) did a similar thing back in 1996–7 with "core fonts for the web" in which they tried to push a standard pack of fonts out to everyone so that web designers could assume that end users would have certain key fonts.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_fonts_for_the_Web

It's not some big conspiracy, it's about making the web easier to use, easier to read, and easier to design.

That and making it easier for developers to make better websites encourages more usage of the internet .

TypeKit helped build part of this (http://code.google.com/apis/webfonts/docs/webfont_loader.htm...), so read what you can there.

(blatant self promotion) http://kernest.com supports iPhone/iPad and categorizes fonts by character set (cyrillic, greek, etc) - http://kernest.com/subsets/

Odd, just looking at the compatibility sheet and then my analytics says that Google's Chrome is by far the worst offender in not supporting this. Chrome sits at 15% of my sites traffic and about 75% of that is pre-4.249.4.

Another notch in the "soon every web page you visit will cause your browser to talk to Google" spider's web.

They're already usually chatting somehow. Analytics. Adsense. Etc.

Exactly. It's happened so queitly and unremarked as well. It's the scope of your "etc." which is growing.

Doubleclick ads, embedded youtube videos, centrally hosted frameworks such as jQuery, embedded RSS feed aggregation, Google Charts / sparklines, Maps, custom site search with autocomplete, Google Talk client, Picasa images, Waves, iFramed Docs/Calendars...

Wondering how long till these show up in Google docs.

Wait, for all this, there are just 17 fonts in their directory? I mean, appreciated of course, but is this all that helpful for a web developer?

Doesn't seem to work on the iPad.

Typekit doesn't work with iPhone-OS Webkit either (our designer put a bunch of typekit goo on our site).

Google, usability! I should be able to go from a font page to your really nice configuration page that lets me control it even more: http://code.google.com/webfonts/preview

Dammit Google, why did I have to search my history for a link to this awesome page. Sometimes, I swear people ignore intuitive things that are just too obvious.

Also, I find the use of the word "implement" on this page hilarious. It's dropping the same font-face crap thats been in HTML5 for months into a webpage. The only difference is that it's hosted by Google.

Then again, Twitter was abuzz with everyone freaking out about DnD in html5. Guess if Google's not holding peoples' hands they might as well be useless. I also saw a tweet where someone asked if the REST API would be available for the iPhone. I facepalmed.

Right downmods because font-face, DnD and REST APIs are hard and new things.