As you are probably aware of, the Internet is not as global and universal as one might expect or hope. We still live in a world where 7-bit ASCII text on the web is the only common format that is truly supported in all countries.

There are other problems beside that text in web pages is represented (encoded) in different ways in different countries. Even if a browser can decode a particular web page, it may still miss a font suitable to display text of the particular language.

Showing text in web pages is not easy even in 7-bit countries. Browsers may not support web fonts, and may only support crude formatting. The predominant way of creating good-looking web pages today is therefore to show text as graphics or to use proprietary and incompatible font-embedding technologies. Both approaches are time consuming and have drawbacks.

Recent versions of modern browsers address these problems to some degree. However, users are righteously objecting to having to upgrade their browsers. Upgrading may be costly, complicated and even hazardous.

We have designed a piece of software to solve these problems. It assists web browsers by processing the text in web pages on a web server. This software is a CSS Level 2 parser, with very sophisticated text encoding, text rendering, and font embedding capabilities.

When using this software, known as the Font Augmentation Internet Resource System (a.k.a. FAIRY), a browser will be fed the appropriate content for it to render a web page faithfully. Such a page may thus contain text of any language, formatted with any fonts, and will be presented as intended in any browser and on all systems.

We are thus offering support for CSS Level 2 and web font embedding to all browsers through server software. This is known as Server Gated CSS Level 2 and Server Gated Web Fonts.