So, I’ll offer my services. I’m a technical author by trade (information designer, technical communicator etc etc) and will happily help out with those simple instructions (I agree with Andrei on that one). No offense if you’d rather not involve a complete stranger, but I’d rather offer than not.

Drop me a line if I can be of service, and as soon as I’ve implemented sIFR on my site (part of it anyway) I’ll have an even better idea of how it works. Top job guys.

Here’s my q: is there some issue using an OpenType font for embedding with Flash? i.e. will that only work with either TrueType or Postscript fonts?

(nice work, btw. Trying to convince an anti-Flash compatriot to allow me to use it, doubt it will happen, but I definitely *will* add it to my “bag of tricks” ;))

Wow, i didnt even notice my url suggestion had made it into the file (and that it even worked!)

Along with everyone else, I would like to thank you and of course Mr Inman & Mr Jogin (and others involved) for contributing towards such a useful tool and providing your time and patience towards each post.

If i could buy you all a round at the pub tonight I would.
And if you are ever in New Zealand – you can hold me to that!
Cheers

That being said, I thought I’d offer up a suggestion that we used on our version. This became all the more pertinent when I saw Scrivs comment on CSSVault about Jeff Croft’s site taking a while to load IFR and I noticed he was using sIFR.

To give us anywhere from a few milliseconds to a few full seconds quicker load time of our IFR implementation, we place a call to the “action” function in the footer of the page. This allows it to fire before “onload” so if an image or two are hanging it can fire when it gets to that point, instead of waiting for those extra items to load. This is particularly helpful if you have ads or something from another server you may be waiting on.

We happen to use a second .js file that we call at the bottom, just in case we ever need to change something it will be easy to do everywhere, but it could just as easily be a call to the function itself.

So you would have to make the following changes:
1 – Initialize a variable at the top called “flashHasRun” (or whatever)

var flashHasRun;

2 – Edit the sIFR function as follows

function sIFR () {
if(!flashHasRun){
// Parameters: item_to_replace , swf_filename, width, height, textcolor, bgcolor, additional_vars
// All are optional except first two parameters

TJ_replaceElement(‘h1′,’sIFR.swf’,”,”,’#990000′,’#FFFFFF’,”);
TJ_replaceElement(‘h2.replace’,'sIFR.swf’,”,”,’#002D6F’,'#FFFFFF’,”);
TJ_replaceElement(‘div.replace’,'sIFR.swf’,”,”,’#2D6F00′,’#FFFFFF’,”);

SI_forceRedraw();
flashHasRun = true;
}
}

3 – Add the function or second .js file in the footer (or at least after the last heading is created)

<script type=”text/javascript”>
sIFR ();
</script>

The nice thing about this is that it is completely optional. You leave the onload and if you don’t run the footer call, then the onload will make it run. If you do use the footer, then the variable gets set to make sure it doesn’t run twice.

It can make a noticeable difference on graphic heavy pages, or any page that may hang on a single thing for whatever reason. Is fairly painless to implement, and even then is completely optional.

Anyway… great work guys, hopefully this is of some help.

Regarding to-do-list-nr 8; the simple solution would be to put the .swf file off root on your server. That way you can only reach the file through your pages, not via direct link…

I am replacing 11 headlines. IE takes a moment and then renders (no big deal).
In Safari all the headlines render crisp (high-res) but then fade to display the way Flash looks when it is showing in Lower-Res…

Any thoughts?
–
Todd

I guess my next question is: Since currently Safari is the only browser to support the CSS2 text-shadow rule, is there any way to add text shadow effects to text using this method so that all browsers can use them?