Cross-domain font-face issues

Question

please read all of this before commenting.

I'm currently working on a large website which is hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS). This allows us to use scalability features in situations where the website might take a big traffic load.

Originally we started by separating out the code of the website a mix of HTML/PHP/Java etc and have static assets on a separate server. When I first tried using font-face in this setup I found that Firefox and IE would not load the font, and quickly discovered it was a cross-domain issue. There are a variety of solutions to this, which include modifying headers to allow access to the font files. However, the storage system we're using doesn't allow for this type of header modification.

In a bid to see if I could just get the fonts to work across all browsers I moved them and the CSS file that calls them to the same domain as the website. However they still don't seem to load up in Firefox or IE. If I copy the code and run it locally in my documents everything seems fine in all browsers (so the files cannot be corrupt). Firefox is definitely finding the files as I can see them being loaded via FireBug.

I've checked all URLs to make sure they're correct and resolve where they should.

Here's the font-face CSS I'm using with the smiley hack:

@font-face {
    font-family : "AllerRegular";
    src : url('aller_rg-webfont.eot');
    src : local('☺'),
          url('aller_rg-webfont.woff') format('woff'), 
          url('aller_rg-webfont.ttf') format('truetype'), 
          url('aller_rg-webfont.svg#webfontooYDBZYS') format('svg');
    font-weight : normal;
    font-style : normal;
}

The CSS file sits in the same directory as the fonts.

I also have the MIME types set in a .htaccess file which sits in the same folder as the fonts.

AddType application/vnd.ms-fontobject .eot
AddType font/truetype .ttf
AddType font/opentype .otf
AddType font/opentype .woff
AddType image/svg+xml .svg .svgz
AddEncoding gzip .svgz
<FilesMatch "\.(ttf|otf|eot|woff|svg)$">
        <IfModule mod_headers.c>
                Header set Access-Control-Allow-Origin "*"
        </IfModule>
</FilesMatch>

If you have any ideas please suggest.
I've been searching the web for a few days now but all solutions have failed me.

Answer 1

Currently, serving webfonts from AWS likely won't work in Firefox and IE 9+ because AWS doesn't support the Access-Control-Origin-Header. See this post on the AWS forums. Seems to be a problem for a lot of people.

Update 7/17/12:

As an alternative to AWS, Google's cloud services support cross-origin file serving. I just set up a bucket to serve webfonts, and it seems to be working. See this blog post and the documentation for more info.