sIFR 3 Beta

The sIFR project released version 3 beta 1 just in time for the new year. The highlights of the new feature set are as follows:

• No more Flash 7 support.
• Supported browsers are Internet Explorer 6+, Firefox 1.0+, Safari 2.0+, Opera 8+ and Konqueror 3.5.6 (not yet released)
• Improved Flash detection.
• Improved rendering in Internet Explorer.

I know that a lack of support for Flash 7 doesn't sound like a new feature, but it lead to a simplification of the code and Flash 8 has significant market penetration at this point.

For those who don't know, sIFR is a utility that allows you to use fancy fonts in your headers for your web design projects. Fonts that you would never normally use because they are not commonly installed.

I've gone back and forth with my desire to use sIFR over the years. There have been drawbacks in the past - for instance, if you wanted to link headlines to article pages, it wasn't possible or it was problematic. That problem has since disappeared. Another problem in the past was the capability of selecting text, which has disappeared as well. At this point, it is definitely a mature project, and they've intelligently addressed usability concerns for disabled users.

The downsides at this point are:

• Requirement of owning a copy of Flash 8 or higher for the web designer (I own MX 2004) for creating your own font sets from fonts you have installed on your system.
• Javascript load size - not so bad all by itself, but when you are considering adding functionality from other libraries, it gets sizable quickly
• Adding multiple downloadable elements to a page - the javascript and the flash file on top of your existing extra weight from javascript files, images, etc.

I think I'm actually going to give it a shot one more time. I hope that I can finally justify adding this to my web design projects because I've wanted to add sIFR to my toolkit for a long time.

The project is licensed under the Lesser GPL - which is actually a fairly unrestrictive license. For a good summary of what the license means, check Creative Commons.

I have a sIFR demo page up if you want to have a peek at what all of this really means.