Daniel Marino

sIFR - To Use or Not to Use?

I realize sIFR has been around for several years now, but it seems like it’s only been getting really popular over the past year. I myself only heard about it three or four months ago. I’ve been looking for an excuse to use sIFR since.

When designing this site, I thought it would be the perfect opportunity to try it out. However, you’ll notice that my headers in green are images. In the QA phase of this site, I had implemented sIFR, but ultimately decided to drop it for several reasons.

Not necessarily a reason for not using sIFR, this is more of a gripe. It took me a while to figure out how to get it working properly, and that was kind of a turn off. I didn’t find the documentation too much help either. I found it easier looking at websites that already have sIFR implemented. I finally did get it to work. And of course, now that I was able to get it to work once, the process is pretty straight forward.

I only have a few headers, and I don’t plan on changing them anytime soon, if at all, so I only have a few images. Each of them weighs in at about 1 – 2k. The SWF file that sIFR uses to grab the font from weighs 8k alone. When you add in the Javascript file (10k) and the CSS (2k), we’re talking 6k versus 20k. That may not seem like a big deal now in the high-speed internet age, but some of us still are on dial-up.

Another reason why I’m not totally down with sIFR is because the documentation recommends publishing the SWF file at version 6. Flash users know that versions prior to 8 do not handle fonts very well, with the appearance of being blurry. Flash 8 introduced the option to set fonts at anti-alias for readability, which is a drastic improvement.

Note: I took a break from writing this post, right about here, so that I could play with sIFR for a little bit. That time I spent fiddling around made a huge difference and I was able to figure out a lot of the padding and sizing issues that I was having. I was actually able to replicate the headings that are used on this website. Also, I tried publishing my SWF at version 8 and it worked with no problems and it cleared up the blurry font issue.

I still don’t really seeing myself using sIFR here because of the file size issues I mentioned earlier. Plus it only took me about 30 seconds to create each graphic where it took me almost an hour to reproduce the same effects using sIFR. I’m not writing in defense of not using sIFR. I think most people would agree, that for my situation, using images for headers is the best and easiest solution. If I wanted to use non-standard web fonts for headings that were going to be changing on a regular basis, such as the titles to my blogs, sIFR would be the obvious choice.