Web sites with custom fonts
Ivan | Fri, 2005-04-29 17:14First check out this sample page. Notice the variety of fonts?
Over the last several months, a small group of web developers and designers have been hard at work perfecting a method to insert rich typography into web pages without sacrificing accessibility, search engine friendliness, or markup semantics. The method, dubbed sIFR (or Scalable Inman Flash Replacement), is the result of many hundreds of hours of designing, scripting, testing, and debugging by Mike Davidson and Mark Wubben.
If you ever wanted to add fonts to your sites that are not the typical "serif", "sans-serif", "cursive", "fantasy", "monospace" than check out sIFR 2.0
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i've heard about this for awhile. good to see it's taking off! Free us from our pull quotes and headers being arial! WOOHOO!!
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Let's go a little deeper.
Joshua Aronoff
email:
http://www.josharonoff.com
sIFR is a great tool, and it's really easy to implement. now i'm writing my thesis - monday is deadline - on Tipography with CSS, and i'm already discussing sIFR.
Btw. i'm hoping sIFR won't be a craze just like flash in the late nineties, because a lot of people can feel two colors wheter they harominize, or go together; but they can't choose a good font.
if so, i have a bad feeling - maybe, i'm too exhausted to be optimistic, but i hope i'm wrong this time -, we're going to hate and curse sIFR...
http://notv.fw.hu - relaunching soon
my little blog:
http://www.notv.hu
I've been using this on my new design and I absolutely love it. If you can get the setup, it's a great tool that I think everyone should use.
It seemed my comments have been deleted.
Only I and Junyor has comment deleting authority and we didn't delete it. Sorry for the trouble. Maybe you didn't press the submit hard enough? Can you retype it pls?
, is the result of many hundreds of hours of designing, scripting, testing, and debugging by Mike Davidson and Mark Wubben
Shaun Inman put a few minutes into it here and there as well, hence the I in sIFR.
My Adblocker seems to have done a good job of blocking some of the content on the sample page. Should this be a concern for future use of sIFR?
You have got to be kidding me. Does anyone here actually use Dreamweaver? Who is Mike & Mark? Why did they spend hundreds of hours on this? Are they clueless? Do they expect us to thank them for this g
Again, this the most ridiculous thing I have read.
Reason: Dreamweaver has let us do this for over 2 years!! That's right it actually makes a small Flash document by itself, and then embeds just the characters you need and nothing more and then compresses the crap out of it. 'Course, you could also use Flash to do this... or Freehand, or even Illustrator.
But would you be able to insert your Dreamweaver code into a blog or any other CMS template? I guess not. Remember sIFR is a dynamic technology.
Simply embedding Flash files everywhere makes a mess of your page. Look at the source for this... It's very clean. You can use standard, semantic, valid markup. It won't destroy your search engine results or make your content inaccessible. You don't have to create a Flash file for each headline, just one.
I don't use it myself, but it has become so refined that I'm starting to consider it. Visit the link for more about it... Perhaps you should take a moment to learn what it is before you declare it useless.
Regarding the Adblocker comment, I do know they're working hard to make sure everything works correctly (or at least scales back properly) for people with ad and Flash blocking plugins.
It's too bad there's still no proper way to embed fonts in a page, like Microsoft's WEFT that never really went anywhere.