I've been waiting for this since the days of IE6 - I remember experimenting with an IE-specific way of embedding bitmap fonts into a web page. They looked horrible and only worked on IE; no good. As a stopgap measure, I've implemented a PHP script (called textfrag) which essentially renders all fonts server-side and sends them to the browser as GIFs. This works rather effectively - you can see this in action on my personal website http://slinq.com/ ..and before any of you say anything, I don't care about accessibility and it doesn't seem to have hurt my search engine rankings. Textfrag is available to download from my website (opensource / free / don't care) although it's still on its first release - I will be continuing development on this until such time as there is a standard way of embedding a vector font into a web page that works on every browser (probably still a long way off). Even then - it's problematic - the law in my country (as I understand it) makes bitmap renderings of any font freely redistributable (you cannot claim copyright protection of a bitmap font), but distrubiting a vector font requires that you be licensed to do so.

During this article I count 14 uses of the phrase "said people familiar with the matter". After the 10th time I started wondering who these familiar people were. Is this some kind of WSJ in-joke that I'm not party to, or is the journalist just not very good?