sIFR: Custom fonts for plain old HTML text
It use to be, that the font used on your website had to be installed on the user’s computer. This left web designers with only a few fonts to use that were consistent across systems. The number of common fonts has grown from three to about a dozen in recent years.
To work around this limitation and to incorporate non-standard fonts into their website, many designers have resorted to a variety of workarounds. These have included: replacing HTML text with graphics, replacing entire Web pages with PDF or Flash, and using CSS font family selectors to inform the browser of a series of font choices.
Each of these techniques has one major flaw. None of them safely render live HTML text in a non-standard font. This limits the ability of search engines to index the content of a site and reduces the ability of people to find the content.
This is what made me so excited to learn about a new method that has recently come on the scene — sIFR, which stands for Scalable Inman Flash Replacement (after original creator Shaun Inman). sIFR replaces HTML text on the fly with dynamically generated Flash text. In other words: your site uses plain old HTML text but visitors see Flash text. It works through CSS selectors (tags used to describe what the text is).
sIFR can be used to style headings, captions, navigation items, and even short paragraph text like block quotes, pull quotes, or what have you — but it wouldn’t be practical to use this technology to style entire pages of text. It provides an elegant method for customizing the look of web pages while keeping the content accessible to search engines.
Leave a Reply