Upgrade: New Navigation but No sIFR
I launched this site once I knew everything was working. It seems like that is how I have been designing websites lately. Get it working first, then clean it up later. Is that lazy? Anyway, I installed the first of many upgrades today. Most of them probably won’t get announced because they will be minor tweaks, but I wanted to talk a little bit about this one.
I added the hiding/revealing navigation on the top and bottom of the page. To make this work I slightly modified a javascript that was written by Shaun Inman. Thank you Shaun for being so willing to let people learn from your skills! Shaun is the father of sIFR, which stands for Scalable Inman Flash Replacement. sIFR is an amazing tool for anyone interested in expanding the typography on your website beyond the generic. If your browser has a Flash Player installed, sIFR will replace the text you specify with a different font. Since swf files have the ability to have fonts embedded in them, sIFR allows you to create headlines using any font that you own. It really is a smart way to bring rich typography to the web. So why am I not using sIFR if it is so great? Believe me, I want to. Unfortunately, sIFR still has a couple shortcomings that are keeping me from fully endorsing it.
1. sIFR doesn’t support transparent backgrounds.
Actually it can support transparent backgrounds on some browsers, but it isn’t recommended. I would be replacing the text on the wood textures, so it is a shame that the transparent background doesn’t work better. My workaround was to use the wood texture in the Flash file. I would have been satisfied with that solution if it weren’t for the other problem…
2. It doesn’t support letter spacing
I like to give Trajan a wide letter spacing in my headlines, and this just isn’t possible using sIFR. I tried setting it in Flash, since Flash 8 allows letter spacing to be set for dynamic text. Unfortunately, that variable gets lost by the time it is generated in the swf on the fly. Even if that would have worked, I wasn’t happy with requiring Flash Player 8 just to read my headlines.
So overall, sIFR was a series of compromises that I just wasn’t willing to make for this site. I am looking forward to using it in less demanding scenarios and I am hoping the bugs get worked out in the next release.
