User Experience - Thursday, March 6, 2008 17:56 - 4 Comments

siFR and the user experience

Scalable Inman Flash Replacement or sIFR for short, combines Flash and JavaScript to enable the display of custom fonts on a web page. sIFR is attractive to both web designers and developers as it provides an accessible and semantic alternative to other methods of font replacement.

sIFR enhanced sites require a modern web browser with the Adobe Flash plugin installed and JavaScript enabled. For visitors lacking these features, sIFR will degrade to a suitable baseline font and continue to render both on the page and in the generated source code.

In theory, sIFR is a perfect response to one of the more frustrating restrictions imposed on web designers by the medium. Unfortunately, the technology is not without its flaws and ultimately should not be considered a viable choice for web professionals.

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