SIFR: Great looking typography on the web
by Kevin Dangoor
Wow. No, I mean wow. SIFR, an LGPLed combination of JavaScript, CSS and Flash, let’s you easily use any font for text on your pages, regardless of whether the user has the font. It leaves your pages fully accessible and searchable, and it drops and and removes very easily. Look at the example page to see the kind of coolness I’m talking about. (Link via Ian Landsman.)
Yeah that’s what I said. I’ve seen tons of attempts at this, but this is far and away the best I’ve ever seen. I would actually use this if I had the right place to do it. A local newspaper site or something like that. Very cool.
You might want to check out this post: http://smallinitiatives.com/2005/03/24/the-experiments-over/
It’s pretty cool on article detail pages, but on index pages and section fronts, it doesn’t seem to scale.
That’s a good point, and something I would certainly have guessed. Usually, it’s not going to be good practice to try to replace all of the text on the page with some random font you have, because users have their own preferences in fonts for reading. For headlines, though, you want something that stands out and SIFR helps.
I can see that not working well on an index page though. You certainly have to assume there will be *some* lag, and if you multiply that lag by 20 headlines, you’ve got an annoying page.