After I did some research I came to the conclusion that @font-face isn't dropped by the W3C and that's good to hear. With this "at-rule" you can let a UA download a specific point that is somewhere located on the web. This way you are ensured (if the browser supports it) that everyone gets your company house-style font for example.
Not everyone is going to like this off course so in my opinion UA's who supports this (it is in CSS2 en CSS3, not in CSS2.1) should or ask the user to download it or handle it the same way like images, I like the last method most. So the user should have an option to deny fonts like they can already do with images and javascript (though javascript can be downloaded, when it is scripted inline, which is evil).
So how does this property work:
@font-face{
font-family:"Robson Celtic";
src:url("http://site/fonts/rob-celt"); /* relative works fine too of course */
}
p{
font-family:"Robson Celtic",serif;
}
The UA first checks if it got the font, if not it downloads it from the specified URI. Not 100% CSS2 (or CSS3, not CSS2.1) aware browsers will take a default serif font if nothing is installed. I may going to run some tests this weekend in order to get some browser compatibility statistics. I would definitely like to know that.
The W3C specifications: