In my historicizing project, I am going to look at what it took to convert the fonts we have been using for the printed word into web-ready versions. I found out there are aspects of projecting fonts that I would not have thought of before. These aspects affect how a specific font is rendered to most closely reflect the author or designers intentions with a message. Let's look at some of the tools, skills people and movements which went in to web fonts as we now know them.
Another method called CUFON is said to be a worthy alternative to the aforementioned image-replacement. It requires the enabling of Javascript on a browser, and like sIFR, not all foundries and typeface makers allow their fonts to be used with it free of charge.
The use of fonts has a lot of impact on what your site looks like, and there are many communities out there which are passionate about the access which they have to those they would like to use or those they would not like to see used.
I’ve started to wonder about what effects the way people view technology has on what the technology later becomes. It seems evident that in the case of Web-based fonts, we can take Bijkers third concept from his theory of sociotechnical change and prognosticate out what it means in the long run. As such there may have been (and perhaps still are) multiple interpretations of what web fonts originally were in the role of web site design. In their original form, it seems that there was a predominant construct of them as very simply defined and carried out, and not having as much of a role in what a site was. This can be seen in how web fonts were originally coded in HTML itself. As there became more of an understanding of fonts as more complicated and worthy of a good deal more code, the interpretation of fonts as a more complicated and much more integral piece of the design of websites took over and it is now easily rendered using CSS. Likely both of these interpretations of fonts themselves existed at the same time, because they have not changed all that much. But as the predominant interpretation of what they are has changed, so too has how they are used and what technologies and elements are put in place to facilitate this use.