Scalable Inman Flash Replacement (sIFR) is an obsolete JavaScript and Adobe Flash dynamic web fonts implementation, enabling the replacement of text elements on HTML web pages with Flash equivalents. It is

open-source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

and was initially developed by Mike Davidson and improved by

Mark Wubben Mark may refer to: Currency * Bosnia and Herzegovina convertible mark, the currency of Bosnia and Herzegovina * East German mark, the currency of the German Democratic Republic * Estonian mark, the currency of Estonia between 1918 and 1927 * Fi ...

. It is a scalable variety of HTML text-to-flash replacement pioneered by

Shaun Inman Shaun is an anglicized spelling of the Irish name Seán. Alternative spellings include Shawn, Sean and Shawne. Notable persons with the given name include: People *Shaun (musician) (born 1990), South Korean musician *Shaun (YouTuber), British v ...

. With the retirement of Adobe Flash across all major web browsers, and the introduction of web font support in

CSS Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language used for describing the presentation of a document written in a markup language such as HTML or XML (including XML dialects such as SVG, MathML or XHTML). CSS is a cornerstone techno ...

, sIFR is no longer in mainstream use.

Overview

support in web browsers did not, at the time of sIFR's creation, allow webpages to dynamically include web fonts, so there was no guarantee that fonts specified in CSS or HTML would show as intended, as the browsing user may or may not have had the specified font installed in their system. sIFR embeds a font in a Flash element that displays the text, pre-empting the need for a font to have been manually pre-installed on a user's system. A common technique is to use

raster graphics upright=1, The Smiley, smiley face in the top left corner is a raster image. When enlarged, individual pixels appear as squares. Enlarging further, each pixel can be analyzed, with their colors constructed through combination of the values for ...

to display text in a font that cannot be trusted to be available on most computers. Text created this way pixelates when scaled and cannot be partially selected. In contrast, sIFR text elements mimic normal HTML text – they are relatively resizable and copyable. sIFR requires JavaScript to be enabled and the Flash plugin installed in the reading browser. If either condition is not met, the reader's browser will automatically display traditional CSS based styling instead of the sIFR rendering. sIFR is not designed for body copy text as rendering greater bodies of text with Flash places formidable demands on the computer. Due to this restriction, Mike Davidson himself admitted that sIFR has been used on a variety of well-known web pages, such as those of GE, Nike and

Red Hat Red Hat, Inc. is an American software company that provides open source software products to enterprises. Founded in 1993, Red Hat has its corporate headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina, with other offices worldwide. Red Hat has become ass ...

. As of December 2008, the current sIFR release was version 2.0.7, and version 3 was in beta.

Limitations

Growing popularity of browser ad blocker plugins and some smartphones may prevent Flash content from loading, instead displaying a "block" button which thereby obscures the page data, although this can be adjusted through individual plugin settings.

Alternatives

Since the creation of sIFR, dynamic web fonts support in browsers has been renewed, with at least the latest versions of the four most popular browsers supporting them. Older alternatives to sIFR included: * Facelift Image Replacement (FLIR) is a similar software to sIFR. However, instead of using Flash, it embeds plain images that are generated automatically from the text on the webpage. However, FLIR requires that the website host is capable of running PHP, and it is even less accessible than sIFR. * Cufón is an alternative that converts font paths to vector graphics stored in

JSON JSON (JavaScript Object Notation, pronounced ; also ) is an open standard file format and data interchange format that uses human-readable text to store and transmit data objects consisting of attribute–value pairs and arrays (or other ser ...

data format and then renders the fonts to canvas elements or VML (depending on availability) using a JavaScript rendering engine. A significant disadvantage in using Cufón is the requirement that the embedded font's

license A license (or licence) is an official permission or permit to do, use, or own something (as well as the document of that permission or permit). A license is granted by a party (licensor) to another party (licensee) as an element of an agreeme ...

allow its distribution in unencrypted form, which many commercial fonts expressly forbid.

Trivia

The name of the original technique was derived from an anagram of the acronym for the CSS image-replacement technique it was designed to replace,

Fahrner Image Replacement CSS image replacement is a Web design technique that uses Cascading Style Sheets to replace text on a Web page with an image containing that text. It is intended to keep the page accessible to users of screen readers, text-only web browsers, or ...

References

External links