About ten years ago, I first played with Microsoft’s font-embedding technology for the web, WEFT.   It was pretty simple — generate a condensed version of your web page’s font files, add some code to embed them in your HTML, and then any lucky user of Internet Explorer 4+ could see your site just the way you intended it.

Like any good web innovation from Microsoft, it wasn’t supported by rival browsers, so I forgot about it for a while, checking in every now and then for some progress. In the meantime, I generated headlines and buttons as images, even going so far as to use a Comic Sans with Windows 95).

Of course, I also watched in disgust as the web community foolishly flocked to

Then, last week, I read about Cufón on Cameron Moll’s blog.  It’s a pure JavaScript/CSS solution for rendering text with your desired typeface, which is used just like WEFT, only the font conversion occurs through an online script rather than desktop software.  Cameron lists Cufon’s drawbacks as compared to sIFR, but they seem pretty reasonable given its advantages: Cufón does not require third-party client software, it zooms cleanly within the browser, and it’s very easy to work with.

WEFT hasn’t died, though.  Implementation is still perilous, and font licensing issues still hamper it, but Firefox 3.1 3.5 will support the @font-face rule.

All this discussion raises the question: is it worth it?  I love typography; in fact, I’m teased at the office for trying to use such wacky, non-traditional fonts like Helvetica in our PowerPoint presentations.  On the web, though, I don’t think the benefits of custom fonts outweigh the costs to usability and complexity of implementation.  There are some great examples of web typography that carefully use default fonts. I think I’ll wait for ubiquitous, consistently cross-browser support of web-embeddable fonts before wading those waters again.