For nearly fifteen years, if you wanted to set a paragraph of web text in a serif typeface, the only truly readable option was Georgia. But now, in web type’s infancy, we’re starting to see some valid alternatives for the king of screen serifs. What follows is a list of serif typefaces that have been tuned—and in some cases drawn from scratch—for the screen.

Stephen Coles, December 6, 2010:
Cure for the Common Webfont, Part 2: Alternatives to Georgia

TrueType font embedding has come to iPhone and iPad, Hallelujah, brothers and sisters. That is to say, Mobile Safari now supports CSS embedding of lower-bandwidth, higher-quality, more ubiquitous TrueType fonts. This is huge. Test on your device(s), then read and rejoice:

The Typekit Blog: iOS 4.2 improves support for web fonts
iOS 4.2 is also the first version of Mobile Safari to support native web fonts (in TrueType format) instead of SVG. This is also exciting news, as TrueType fonts are superior to SVG fonts in two very important ways: the files sizes are dramatically smaller (an especially important factor on mobile devices), and the rendering quality is much higher.

Ryan N.: Confirmed: TrueType Font Support on Mobile Safari on iOS 4.2
Thanks to Matt Wiebe for mentioning the rumour that Mobile Safari on iOS 4.2 supports TrueType fonts and providing a handy link to test.

TrueType
TrueType is an outline font standard originally developed by Apple Computer in the late 1980s as a competitor to Adobe’s Type 1 fonts used in PostScript. TrueType has become the most common format for fonts on both the Mac OS and Microsoft Windows operating systems.

The primary strength of TrueType was originally that it offered font developers a high degree of control over precisely how their fonts are displayed, right down to particular pixels, at various font sizes. With widely varying rendering technologies in use today, pixel-level control is no longer certain in a TrueType font.

More about webfonts
If you’re coming late to the party, the following bits of required reading and listening will get you up to speed on the joys (and occasional frustrations) of “real type” on the web:

Bulletproof @font-face syntax, Paul Irish, 4 September, 2009

Web Fonts at the Crossing, Richard Fink, 8 June 2010, A List Apart
Big Web Show Episode 1, Dan Benjamin and I discuss webtype with Ethan Dunham of Fontspring and Font Squirrel and Jeffrey Veen of Typekit
Big Web Show Episode 18, Dan Benjamin and I discuss webtype, screen resolution, and more with Roger Black

Thanks
My thanks to David Berlow of Font Bureau for waking me from my Thanksgiving stupor and alerting me to this exciting slash overdue development.

The long-planned inevitable has now been announced. With open-source-licensed web fonts, web font hosting, and add-a-line-to-your-header ease of configuration, Google has joined Typekit, Font Squirrel, Ascender, Font Bureau and others in forever changing the meaning of the phrase, “typography on the web.”

The Google Font Directory lets you browse all the fonts available via the Google Font API. All fonts in the directory are available for use on your website under an open source license and served by Google servers.

Oh, and Typekit? They’re in on it, and they couldn’t be more pleased.

m.nicewebtype.com is a light yet essential mobile site for people who design websites, love type, and struggle to keep up with the dizzying world of web fonts. In it, Tim Brown, author of Nice Web Type, creator of Web Font Specimen (what’s that?), and latterly type manager for Typekit, curates the Design Twitterverse to share the latest insights, innovations, quips, and controversies regarding everyone’s favorite new web design fetish.

Don’t leave home without it.

This is a bookmarklet made for web designers who want to rapidly check how different fonts and font styles look on their screen without editing code and refreshing pages. 

Download the amazing and oh-so-practical Soma FontFriend bookmarklet.

Real fonts on the web: House Industries supports WOFF format.

…a font format for the Web that satisfies the needs and concerns of browser makers, web designers, and type foundries. … WOFF offers compression to speed page load times, freedom from thorny legacy issues, and inclusiveness (font outlines can be Postscript or TrueType).

WOFF has the support of a wide spectrum of the type community; from peers such as Emigre, Hoefler & Frere-Jones, Commercial Type, etc., and larger foundries such as Linotype and Monotype. Today it has also gained the support of Mozilla in the their release of Firefox 3.6 (Mozilla has a full list of designers and foundries that support WOFF on that page). We hope and expect that WOFF will quickly gain support in other major browsers as we support, endorse and expect to license our library for use on the Web in the WOFF format in the future.

Read more

The Problem: We have the fonts, we have the CSS and the workaround for IE. What we don’t have is beautiful, reliable, consistent cross-platform rendering of real fonts like Gotham, Franklin, Garamond, etc. — 29 October 2009
Web Fonts and Standards: How real fonts work on the web via standard CSS. Making it work in IE. The licensing hurdle. Rise of the middlemen and their effect on the adoption of font embedding standards. — 17 August
Web Fonts Now, for Real: David Berlow of The Font Bureau publishes a proposal for a permissions table enabling real fonts to be used on the web without binding or other DRM. — 16 July 2009
Web Fonts Now (How We’re Doing With That): Commercial foundries that allow @font-face embedding; browser support; Cufón and SIFR, oh, my; Adobe, web fonts, and EOT; Typekit debuts; — 23 May 2009