One of my favorite web development tools is sIFR, a combination of javascript and Flash that allows you to render elements of a site, such as titles, with non-standard fonts. It allows you to write standard HTML, and the text is replaced at runtime with a Flash embed that renders the text in the desired font. Text can still be selected and copied, search engines and screen readers will see the proper semantic HTML text, and the web designer doesn’t spend countless hours cutting text images in Photoshop.
I came across another utility today called sIFR Lite. It’s pretty much a drop-in replacement for the Javascript portion of sIFR, with a slightly simplified syntax, smaller file size, and auto-detection of the underlying CSS color.
I haven’t used it enough to decide if I’m a convert yet, but it seems tight and it looks to be another useful webdev font hack to add to the toolbox.
2 thoughts on “sIFR Lite – another HTML/Flash font tool”
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sIFR is sooo 2005. Use Cufón (http://cufon.shoqolate.com/) instead! It does similar trick, but uses canvas (or vml on IE) instead of Flash. It’s also faster, has better CSS support, smaller footprint, etc, works even on iPhone etc.