A New Series: sIFR Explained
16 November 08
With all this debate going on recently amongst web designers and developers on embedding fonts (check out Zeldman’s blog entry on talk of new, competing specifications), I thought now would be a great time to dive in a little deeper to a technology that exists today to embed any font you’d like into your pages: sIFR.
If you don’t know, sIFR stands for Scalable Inman Flash Replacement (Inman is Shaun Inman, who originally conceived of the idea). You can read the history of sIFR’s development at Mike Davidson’s website. In short, it takes existing text, styled in CSS with one of the small list of web fonts you are capable of reliably using, and replaces it with a small bit of Flash, where the font you really want to use is embedded. The result: any text can be replaced on the fly with a font you desire. Nice, eh?
I’ve always found that sIFR can be frustratingly difficult to get to know at first. Documentation can be a little tough to follow. So, I’m starting a new series that looks more in-depth into this technology. At the same time, I will be doing my best to take my findings and posting them back on sIFR’s main documentation wiki. I’m going to go through getting sIFR working, then through the properties and methods you can use to customize it, and then go further with examples on interacting with it once text has been replaced. I’d like to throw in stats and benchmarks here and there too, where I can.
So check back soon – I’ll be posting the first article this week. In the meantime, you can check out examples of what people have done on sIFR’s wiki, or check out a site TMX Interactive (the group I work for) designed and marked up that also uses sIFR, Haven Music.