And betting on IE dominance means losing roughly a quarter of visitors as of Nov 2007 the estimated share of IE is 77.35% and considering the niche of the particular site, the stats may tremendously vary: Browser Market Share for November, 2007

Unfortunately the support only covers EOT (embedded opentype fonts) and you need a special tool to create the files.

Go here for more info….

Search Engine Optimization:

The HTML source is clean and free from any images or Flash movies. When the JavaScript is fired elements are replaced using DHTML. Search engines do not do this. They just see the HTML. Check the google guidelines. They tell to turn off JavaScript to see how they index your site.

Server load:

Flash is the best solution while it reuses the Flash movie for any headline and does not perform any server side rendering.

True Font Family can make caches of the images so they are only created once and are stored on the server. Furthermore it tells clients to cache the images so most if not all browsers will only get eache image once.

Traffic load:

The best solution would be if browsers supported web fonts. And both techniques increase the bandwidth used for a page. With increasing connections and bandwidth this is somewhat an issue. But until now these techniques allow you more freedom using fonts on the Internet.

BUT there are few drawbacks that you don’t have with Cascading Style Sheets:

Search Engine Optimization.

As the text is provided in embedded movie or in image we lose the advantage on indexing. Googlebot is not going to consider an image or Flash movie in a way it does with h1-h6 tags. Readability and structuring matters.

Server load.

On any high-traffic site live gdlib rendering would have quite an impact on performance. In these terms Flash would be a better choice.

Traffic load.

CSS is a lightweight method to improve visual detail and was introduced to get spacer images, headline images and all of that off the web. These are the benefits. The above mentioned PHP and Flash methods will both increase the megabytes on the line significantly.

Check out the example from this article in your own browser here

Feel free to check out the HTML source code. The extra line of JavaScript is needed to enable @font-face which is disabled by default. This will prevent the script from checking for imported fonts and makes it slightly faster.

For more information: http://www.truefontfamily.com/

Mozilla’s latest Gran Paradiso Alpha 7 doesn’t support Web Fonts but I do hope the competition will trigger them to go for it.
Internet Explorer on the other hand will probably lag behind as it usually does. My hope is that Microsoft’s lead on the browser market will continue to shrink from what it is significantly.

Web Fonts will raise a lot of copyright issues but so does everything else, e.g. pirated images.

I wonder if this will cause any issues with font copyright. It would be easy for anyone to access commercial fonts if they are defined in the CSS. One solution would be to use PHP or another server-side language to block direct access to the file.