Embedded OpenType

~ the goodbye ~

Internet Explorer 4 shipped in 1997 with something no other browser had: the ability to download a font. The file format was Embedded OpenType, extension .eot, and Microsoft had originally built it to embed typefaces inside Word documents before pointing it at the web.

The problem it was designed to solve was not technical. Type foundries license fonts, and a plain font file sitting on a web server is a font file anyone can take. So EOT was built to be awkward on purpose. It subsetted the typeface down to only the characters a given page actually used, then compressed and encrypted what was left. A list of permitted domains was baked into the file, so it would refuse to render anywhere else. A stolen .eot was a partial alphabet that would not load on your server.

That made the foundries comfortable and made everyone else miserable. You could not produce an .eot by hand. You needed Microsoft's Web Embedding Fonts Tool, a Windows program called WEFT that read your HTML against your TrueType files and then generated the subsets, editing your pages for you on the way through. WEFT's final version was 3.2 and it came out on 25 February 2003. Microsoft stopped offering the tool for download at some point before 2019, so the only sanctioned way to produce the format's own files disappeared well ahead of the format.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the standards fight ~

Microsoft tried to make it everyone's. EOT went to the W3C in 2007 as part of a CSS3 proposal and was rejected. It came back on 18 March 2008 as a standalone submission. The W3C's team comment on that submission said the organization planned to propose a working group aimed at developing EOT into a Recommendation, which is about as close to a yes as that process gives you before it gives you a no.

What happened instead was WOFF. It was submitted in April 2010 by Mozilla and Opera alongside Microsoft, it did the compression without the domain locking or the encryption, and it became a W3C Recommendation on 13 December 2012. Every browser implemented it. From that date EOT was a format with an installed base and no future, and Microsoft's own next browser, Edge, never shipped support for it at all.

~ what it left in the stylesheets ~

For a stretch of roughly 2009 to 2015 the standard way to ship a web font was to ship it four or five times over, and the snippet everybody copied began with the .eot. You declared it first, added a ?#iefix query string to stop IE8 choking on the rest of the rule, then listed WOFF and TrueType underneath for browsers that were not Internet Explorer. Nobody wrote that block from memory. It went around as a paste, from a blog post to a boilerplate to every theme anyone shipped, and a decade of CSS files still carry it.

The retirement date is 15 June 2022, when the Internet Explorer 11 desktop application went out of support, and the format had no other renderer to fall back on. Microsoft disabled the browser outright on 14 February 2023 through an Edge update. The honest footnote is that Internet Explorer mode inside Edge still runs the old engine and is committed to through at least 2029, so an .eot file somewhere on a corporate intranet is probably still rendering today, inside a compatibility mode nobody authors new pages against.

~ the part that was not about English ~

There is a line in the documentation that I keep coming back to: embedded fonts were widely used for non-English-language websites. That was the actual use case for a long time, and it is easy to forget now. If your language needed characters that the visitor's machine might not have a font for, the page could arrive unreadable rather than merely ugly.

Turkish in that era was a steady low-grade argument with other people's software. The dotted and dotless i, the ş and the ğ, all of it depended on your encoding and the font at the other end agreeing with you, and when they did not you got a page of question marks and boxes. I came up on the Turkish web through a 33.6k modem in the late nineties and the broken-character page was simply part of the furniture. EOT was one of the first serious attempts to stop the browser guessing, and it got the ambition right. It got the licensing politics so wrong that the ambition took another fifteen years to arrive properly.

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