Typography (along with layout) is one of the two basic elements of design.

You currently cannot pick a typeface for your website without using graphics. Many excellent designs therefore use images for all headings.

Domestic broadband has reached up to 80% penetration in some countries. It is over 50% in many countries. In commercial organizations it has a much higher penetration. Jakob Nielsen says, “100KB is certainly a reasonable page weight for fast downloads” in ‘Proritizing Web Usability’ (p. 87).

TrueType fonts range in size from about 10KB to about 100KB (gzipped even smaller). Most web pages carry images that are of similar size.

CSS 2.0 defines the @font-face command that explains how a user agent should download a font where required.

@font-face was removed from CSS 2.1 because of a lack of support in existing user agents. (No major web browser implements it apart from support limited to .eot files in Internet Explorer). It is back in CSS 3.0.

It is a Mozilla FAQ to ask why Firefox doesn’t support downloadable fonts. But the reply concerns unicode and support for non-Latin characters rather than design/typographical issues. Nonetheless, support for @font-face does not seem to be on the Mozilla roadmap.

Support for downloadable fonts is not the only thing needed to bring print-like type to the web. Current screen resolutions of 72dpi are much less than the 300 dpi or much more of the printed page.

Does anyone know why implementing @font-face seems to be such a low priority for makers of web browsers?