Incidentally, it looks like Metafilter has picked up on sIFR today and is sending over a ton of traffic to the original sIFR article. Reading the Metafilter comment thread is a bit humorous. It never ceases to amaze me how some people will see the word “Flash” and cry about imaginary accessibility issues, imaginary proprietary file format issues, and other imaginary “sky is falling” issues. Look at the code people. Study it. Analyze it. Understand it before you jump to conclusions. And above all else, understand that the entire web as we know it is a hack. I’d respond on the Metafilter thread myself but I don’t feel like paying $5 to join.posted by wah at 4:44 PM on December 29, 2004
"The scenario: A large sports news website decides to style all their headlines in a unique corporate typeface."translate to "it is a good idea to shove semi-optional binary data at the user" rather than "we don't get the web, we don't get the web, we do not understand the purpose of the web"?
Civil_Disobedient brought up Microsoft's WEFT technology claiming it's the way to go. I cover WEFT in my sIFR article. I love the idea and I wish it worked better. It just doesn't though and that's part of why Microsoft dropped support for it.Embedded font technology is the way to go, not necessarily Microsoft's proprietary implementation. And hell, WEFT is almost a decade old, man. I'm frankly surprised it still works, but there you go.
First of all, it looks terrible without ClearType turned on (over half of PCs have it turned off or just don't even support it at all).As I said before, false. It looks fine on my CRT (Windows XP, ClearType off).
Second of all, it only works in PC/IE.So? That's like General Motors telling Preston Tucker, "Why should we install seat belts? So far you're the only one doing it." How does this even factor into the argument? If you've got a problem with the technology, by all means have at it. But saying, "Nobody else does it" is pretty piss-poor rationale to dismiss it outright.
And third of all, it has other display quirks which make it less than ideal.What display quirks are you talking about that are independent of the operating system? If you send the fonts over to the user, and their OS or browser mangles the fonts, that's not a problem with the base technology.
And given the bleeding-heart, open-source slant of this discussion, I'm surprised anyone is even mentioning WEFT.Give me a fucking break.
Civil_Disobedient claims that text is not zoomable. I understand that part of being a civil disobedient is not doing things that civilized people do (like "read") [...] Most people who have problems seeing small text surf the web with text zoom always turned on. They don't adjust font sizes for every page they hit.Mike, do you get paid to be a prick, because really, you're quite good at it. One of the problems with designers being given free-reign with fonts is that they make webpages with teensy-tiny text completely arbitrarily. I understand your "best usage strategy" dictates that it only be used for headlines. But you'll have to forgive me if I'm not more than a little skeptical that everyone will follow your (very lengthy) guidelines.
I've never run across anything besides designers' personal pages or someone's blog that actually uses dynamic text/image replacement, but if anyone has seen it used professionally, I'd like to know.Here is an example of professional use; I just put this live yesterday. The primary navigation, the secondary navigation, and this particular page's main content are all done using image replacement. (View the source and you'll see what I mean...there's not a single img tag in the HTML!) No, it's not "dynamic," but it's a technique that is currently being used quite a bit, imo. (And it's the exact case that sIFR improves on.)
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posted by smackfu at 11:46 AM on December 29, 2004