Comments on: sIFR 3: A Request for Requests

By: Mike D.

Mike D. — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 21:47:49 +0000

micthemouse: Good question. In my mind, it’s ready to be released, and has been for about a year. I’ve been using it on Mike Industries for probably a year now and it’s been great. Mark, the lead developer on the project, still has a few things he wants to work out before officially releasing it. I encourage you to bug him. :)

By: micthemouse

micthemouse — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 20:57:04 +0000

Just wondering what the status is of sIFR 3. The request for requests was made back in Oct. of 2005 and there have been no recent posts or updates. I realize that 128 requests is a tall order, but is it still being developed or has something else come along that makes sIFR obsolete?

By: Pasquale

Pasquale — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 13:33:28 +0000

A fix for sifr widows: http://darkmotion.com/blog/2008/07/21/reuniting-lonesome-sifr-widows/

By: Links For | Mesut GÃ¼ngÃ¶r

Links For | Mesut GÃ¼ngÃ¶r — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 14:39:25 +0000

[...] Mike Davidson – sIFR 3: A Request for Requestsvia Tommi (again) – letâ€™s you replace any html text by a flash file generated on the fly which letâ€™s you use custom not standard typefacesâ€¦ [...]

By: Michel

Michel — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 09:34:08 +0000

SIFR could implement writing-mode so we could have vertical/rotated tb-rl flipV/flipH for Firefox?

By: Cholo

Cholo — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 19:32:20 +0000

I use swfdec (aka “the free flash implementation that works with youtube”) but sIFR doesn’t work. And it doesn’t degrade either. I don’t know if sIFR can be fixed to work with swfdec (probably it should be the other way ’round) but it would be nice to at least be able to see the browser text.

By: adam

adam — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 16:45:51 +0000

forgot to mention that for PNGfix to work you must also place the pngfix SCRIPT tag at the bottom of the page below the sIFR replacement calls.

By: adam

adam — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 16:29:21 +0000

Someone here posted that they were having a problem using fixpng with sIFR… I had a similar problem where sIFR was breaking my fixpng so I thought I’d post my solution….

in fixpng.js wrap the script in a function, and call it at the end using window.onload like so:

function fixPNGs(); {

…… pngfix script …..

}

window.onload = fixPNGs();

/* Your PNGfix should now work with sIFR */

By: GillBates

GillBates — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I might be talking out of my rear end here… but how about the ability to use a background image (tiled) for the fonts instead of a color?
Thinking in photoshop terms, it’s something similar to making the characters a reveal/hide mask for the background?
I would completely understand if this gets too complicated and oversteps the bounds of sIFR; but I am requesting it because I was recently forced to make use of images instead of beautiful sIFR based fonts in a site because the navigation links used a very specific gradient (with more than 2 tones of the same color).

By: John Patrick

John Patrick — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I’m not sure if this is available to SIFR or not, I haven’t really read up too much about it but I would guess that many people would like their headlines “Horizontally” aligned…… How about “Vertically?”.

Just a side-thought I had while pondering aimlessly.

By: Aaron Egaas

Aaron Egaas — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Thanks for the recognition Mike, Another site we at Mercury Cloud just released that uses sIFR is Howard University's Rankin Memorial Chapel. In addition to sIFR, we used some pretty tight flash satay to display nice flash headers and nav, but if flash is off for some reason, the CSS version looks just as good below.

By: Dave Metcalf

Dave Metcalf — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I tried to use sIFR to replace a header graphic a while back. I wasn’t able to do it, nor could I find any documentation at the time to help achieve this goal. It’s possible there has been a solution discovered since, but if not, I would like to suggest that be added.
It’s ironic, I suppose, since sIFR is supposed to give that graphic look in a dynamic package.

By: Jim M

Jim M — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I have implemented sIFR on a number of occasions and here is what I would like to see:

1. display of transparent background in sIFR that does not show up as a weird green colour in some micro versions of Netscape 7.0 and some Opera browsers.

2. the ability to utilize the print CSS media type and sIFR AND have a transparent background.

3. better text selection abilities.

4. dynamic widths.

5. any chance of making it render faster? The redraw of the page causes a shift unless you use CSS to match the same height of the flash movie. This resulted in VERY LARGE text presentation if flash player is not present as I recall padding and margins of the CSS did not help. (Please contact me if you need a visual explanation.)

6. once the page has rendered and the visitor changed the text-size, ensure that the text inside the flash movie changes accordingly.

7. continue to work with FlashBlock and/or Adblock.

Thanks for this opportunity!

By: Collin

Collin — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

What I noticed with sIFR is that it’s really hard to get the sizes right sometimes in both IE and FF. Any improvements there might help. Although most of those problems come from the tweaking process so maybe it was just the documentation that needed improvements. I know standards are important to follow as far as scalable fonts go but I wouldn’t mind the option to hard code the font sizes.

Gill might be onto something but I can see more problems then it would be worth to allow images to be imported in and masked by the text, especially when the like might end up wrapping. I know that flash had some issues with masks being created and modified dynamically early on and not sure that they fixed it so dynamic text can be used as a mask.

At any rate, it might make sense to add in the ability to import a background image. I can’t think of any time that I would personally use this feature but it would be an alternative to using transparent mode in some cases and is easy enough to pull in images to the swf so it might make a good feature. I have had to lay flash over an existing graphic before and for whatever reason used the image itself as the background of the flash then positioned the movie clip over the image.

Probably best to not get to carried away. Before long you’ll find yourself with an overloaded library of action scipt animations and other things to bloat sIFR. Better to just keep it simple and effective.

By: Brian Sweeting

Brian Sweeting — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I don’t think Flash dynamic text supports it, but it would be nice if there was some way to be able to control kerning of the type.