I highly recommend adding sIFR to your web site, if it is appropriate. I have to admit for a long time I didn’t like it. But, sometimes adding nice looking typography to your site can really make it pop in a way that you can only do with Flash or images. So, the more I use sIFR, the more I like it, and the more I use it, the more I understand how it works. If you don’t know what sIFR is or what it does, please check out Mike Davidson’s sIFR site.
sIFR works by using Javascript and the Flash player to replace headlines in your web page with nicely styled fonts in Flash. If you are a novice to sIFR, there are certain tricks to using it that can greatly enhance your implementation. I won’t go into all of them here, but I will talk about turning off your underlying headlines in sIFR.
When you have sIFR installed on your site, sometimes you tend to notice the unstyled underlying text show up briefly before being replaced by Flash. If you have this problem, you will want to eliminate it to get the best user experience possible. It has a kind of jarring effect when you see the font change suddenly like that, so it is best to avoid it.
The creators have provided a way to turn this off so that you will only see the Flash fonts load when the page loads. You can do this by adding a stylesheet to your header called “sIFR-screen.css.” If you do this, then your headlines should not show by default. This works by creating default styles for your headlines with the class “.sIFR-hasFlash.” All headlines are then set to “hidden” so they will not be displayed if you have javascript and Flash 7 installed. The genius is that is you don’t have javascript or Flash 7 running, the normal unstyled headlines will still be visible.
However, you may want to modify the code if you are only replacing a certain group of headlines, and not all of them at once. You can do this by adding an id to your headers and then adding the id to the header style in your sIFR stylesheet.
I need to warn you here, not to remove the “hasFlash” class from your header styles. If you do this, the headlines will not show up when javascript is not running or you have a version lower than Flash 7. This may be rare, but you can modify the sIFR script to work only with Flash 8, like I did here. I made this mistake, which is how I know you need it.
So in closing, make sure you turn off the underlying headlines when using sIFR. Also, be sure to test your work with Javascript turned off, to make sure those users who have javascript turned off or don’t have the right Flash player can still see your headlines.
