sIFR, Rich Web Typography is Good
I just installed sIFR 2.0 on this blog… and I must say I’m impressed. I’ve tested it on IE, Firefox and Safari, and it works perfectly. It degrades gracefully, too. I tested it on IE 5 for the Mac, and my old title appeared. The only drawback is that it has to wait for the whole page to load before it replaces your text with the sIFR includes.
It was a snap to install, but a little tricky to tweak. I was trying to adjust the line heights on my titles, but it caused the titles to scale in odd ways depending on the length of the text field. From their site:
Over the last several months, a small group of web developers and designers have been hard at work perfecting a method to insert rich typography into web pages without sacrificing accessibility, search engine friendliness, or markup semantics.
Their work has definately paid off. Very very nice work!
Cool… but how is this better than, say, using GD and Freetype to create your text dynamically?
Comment by Mincho — 4/14/2006 @ 6:17 pm
It’s better because it doesn’t use server resources. Using any sort of render-down-to-jpg-on-demand script on your server is bound to be slower than just servicing an HTTP GET for the font SWF and the sIFR JS. The computation necessary to turn a string into an image when using sIFR happens all on your computer in the flash player. Another benefit is that sIFR text in the HTML looks just like normal text — it doesn’t have to be an img tag referencing a server script. This is good for screen readers and search indexers looking at your source.
That said, it’s your choice
Comment by Roger Braunstein — 4/15/2006 @ 7:59 pm
I’ve used it on one small site.
It’s a great technology!
Comment by Nikita — 4/17/2006 @ 1:07 pm