SIFR ... Innovative or Designer's junk?

When I first heard about "sIFR" I thought about anything but what it was. Needless to say, I was skeptic about it from the beginning, and with good reason!.

Is it me or designers shouldn't code?.

(For those who don't know what "sIFR" is, please don't ask in this thread).

If we compare the Java-Script (even if each client downloads it once... at the end, its major bandwidth usage, overkill if you may), the flash movie and the actual meta-data... against a pre-rendered png, well... boys... we are not only talking about 4 times more disk usage server-side, but also latency issues.

I understand the whole principle of "sIFR" but its not properly conceived.

Needless to say, on the client-side, we've got much more memory usage (memory that its wasted from the beginning, ie you can always use pre-rendered text, for crying out loud, and have the same quality if not even better).

Sure, you can't select text from within an image, so what?. Who actually selects a header and copies it?. The minority, of course. Shall we keep on wasting resources for them?. Did I mention that improperly managed and designed flash objects cause major waste of processor's cycles?.


What good does it make, overall, you tell me. As a professional software developer, do you actually believe that "sIFR" is a SOLUTION?, for whom? - Lazy 'designers' that cant waste their precious time pre-rendering text?.

Did I mention, you've got a plug-in dependency?, oh and yes.. the js will end up rendering raw text if not available - so, you ended up downloading and parsing the J.S. for nothing.

I rather move back to a text browser than see the web infested with this abomination.

Designers shouldn't code, period.





PS: To the contrary to your belief, I'm not against evolution.

Well, with the trend being designing symantically correct websites, sIRF is great. If the client supports flash, the sIFR movie is being shown. If no flash is available (i.e. PDA) then the HTML is being shown. The content of the webpage doesn't change, only the way it looks. It very web2.0 ;-)

I speak against pre-rendering any kind of text as image (exept logotypes), because it creates a dependency on the designer - in view of everyday use.

I speak for editable websites in every sense, and that is why sIFR becomes interesting. Besides the php function imagettftext() there seems no possible way to render (editable) text by senders choise of font.

I look forward to jorgejones' opinion about modern times, that is: should one just wait for the better?

Yours
Soren Maarbjerg, designer and joomla-devotee :-)

sIFR is a huge innovation that supports using any font on your website, and degrades nicely. I would say its an enormous advancement that i strongly recommend/support. sIFR is used on a variety of well-known web pages; GE, ABC News, Nike and Red Hat, to name but a few.

so...yay for Scalable Inman Flash Replacement

Another thing why I would prefer sIFR over image is that search engine spiders cannot read text in images.

.. but search engines can read image-replaced text, and that's a lot cleaner than flash-replacement.

As far as I know, flash replacement should only be used when you have dynamic content that needs to be big and styled in a non-standard typeface.

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