sIFR – Font Replacement Technology Explained Pt 2

 

…stands for scalable Inman Flash Replacement. It allows the designer to use the font of their choice by embedding it in Flash (SWF) and then, using JavaScript, hide the text of each selected HTML element and embed a SWF file that displays the text as their font family choice.

 

sIFR is open source software, so the developer can take advantage of manipulating it using the many features of Flash such as anti-aliased text, glow, shadowing and blurring to name but a few. That coupled with animation make this very formidable from a designer’s perspective. The outcome of applying all these effects help make headers become more poignant and help make an article stand out.

 

Link parsing into the SWF file is another feature of sIFR which uses hover over/out methods and styling for each of those events.

 

 

 

 

The first catch is that this does not (straight out of the box) collect all the styling attributes belonging to the text elements that you wish to replace. A designer would be required to ‘style’ all the SWF objects using a specified JavaScript object and then apply specific CSS tweaks to replacement elements.

 

CSS3 and JavaScript already support a lot of the effects mentioned such as shadowing, glow and animation in modern browsers. Although this is not necessarily a catch, rather an alternative and that CSS3 is neither widely supported nor standardised by those browsers that do for that matter, current technologies strongly suggest that this will become a standard.

 

Finally, Flash may soon be fighting in becoming the media standard for animated interfaces, audio and videos with the rise of HTML5 and CSS3 and is already becoming unsupported – unfortunately due to its third party role. As of late, sIFR will not work on the iPhone or iPad as they do not support Flash.