Today at Google I/O, Day 1, Google realeased some great new development platforms, APIs, and productivity tools, but what shouldn't be overlooked is a slick new way that Google is bringing some new fonts to the web. Websites now either need to turn custom fonts in to un-indexable / searchable images, or utilize a small set of fonts that all browsers and computers have installed. And it is pretty boring looking at the same few fonts (here's looking at you Verdana, Arial, Times New Roman), so there have been a lot of hacks done over the years by sites who want to use cool looking fonts.
Google is providing a single line of code, a CSS link tag, which automatically supplies the viewing browser the correct styles it needs to make the font a reality. Then, in the site's CSS you can reference the font by name. This is perfect, and since all these fonts are free / open-source they'll be part of newer browsers and eventually not need that previously mentioned single line of code.
In 5 minutes I changed the title of this blog and the title of all blog entries to a font named Vollkorn and the sub-title to a font named Yanone Kaffeesatz (I'm going to forgive the names, they're free everyone).
Before:
After:
And here are the rest of the fonts you'll see all over the web I predict:
http://code.google.com/webfonts