"For a long time, the web has lagged print and even other electronic media in typographic sophistication. To enjoy the visual richness of diverse fonts, webmasters have resorted to workarounds such as baking text into images. Thanks to browser support for web fonts, this is rapidly changing. Web fonts, enabled by the CSS3 @font-face standard, are hosted in the cloud and sent to browsers as needed," explains Google.
Google not only hosts the fonts, but it also makes it easy to add the fonts to a page with a single line of HTML code. For example, if you want to use Droid Sans, add this code in the HEAD element:
<link href='http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Droid+Sans' rel='stylesheet' type='text/css' />
Then you can use Droid Sans in any CSS rule:
h1 { font-family: 'Droid Sans', arial, sans-serif; }
This is not an image
Google's code works in almost any browser. For Internet Explorer, Google converts the fonts to EOT (Embedded OpenType), a proprietary format created by Microsoft.