Oh sIFR, how I hate you
This post is about a year old, but I still believe it firmly:
sIFR is probably the most obnoxious script on the planet, and I’m pissed off because there’s absolutely no legitimate reason to use it; it doesn’t even serve as a source of revenue. Its purpose? Get this… to make header text on some websites pretty. It accomplishes this by running a large Javascript program to replace regular text with big Flash movies that waste your CPU and bandwidth. sIFR is usually slipped into the HTML code without any respect for whether the user cares about how pretty the header text is, or whether their computer has the processing power to handle this silliness.
The World Wide Web is not a goddamn brochure. It isn’t a shopfront that you set up and make pretty for us. The World Wide Web is a network of documents, for delivering text and information. Flash movies might deliver information every once in a while, or at least entertainment. Pop-up ads do not create new information. Similarly, sIFR does not create any new information. It’s merely useful to you because you want to exploit the Web as if it were a bloated copy of Quark that everyone runs on their computer because it’s so much fun to render other people’s brochures for them.
CSS works because you can disable it and still get a readable, accessible page. When you disable Javascript and Flash, you usually get something useless, because Javascript and Flash are needed for Web applications and content. sIFR abuses the privilege of Javascript and Flash that we grant to Web developers, by using it for no good reason.
So, what sort of reasoned responses did I get about this from fancy-schmancy Web developers? Well, stuff like this:
i dont blame those who hate sifr technology, in fact i blame those newbies/amateurs tech junkie who jumped ont the latest available technology with little or lack of understanding in design/graphic fundamentals. ["You just don't UNDERSTAND my ARTWORK."]
I personally think sIFR is an excellent piece of software to nicely enhance websites. Sure, CSS works too but larger fonts look like total crap in al operating systems that don’t have ClearType or something similar installed. [So? Your page will look a little ugly! Deal with it!!]
I have never heard of sIFR. It sounds like it may be useful to hackers and malware for the internet. A very interesting piece Shii. I am looking forward to finding out more about it.
It’s not useful to hackers, but it is malicious…
Whilst some of what you’re saying seems reasonable enough (I don’t agree with it btw), what you’re saying about sIFR is inaccurate…
“When you disable Javascript and Flash, you usually get something useless. sIFR abuses the privilege of Javascript and Flash that we grant to Web developers…”
When you disable Javascript or Flash on a page that uses sIFR, it degrades gracefully to the underlying HTML.
And describing it as ‘malicious’ is a little far fetched.
PS. I’m not a sIFR fanboy by the way, I don’t even use it - however I do choose to understand a technology properly before I comment on it
This is true. If you want to use a font that most people have, use it. If you want to use a font most people don’t, use images. If you want to use images without manually creating a title image each time, PHP scripts to do this are simple and have been around for a while now!
There’s no need to unload the task of rendering onto the client-side when it could be done in advance with images while being more compatible, lower filesize and a near 100% chance of working right.
I understand the reasons why you dislike sIFR, but you discount the power of a truly effect typographical scheme. It is not merely an issue of making a page “prettier,” but rather presenting it in the most readable and visually coherent fashion possible. Such a goal may be made more difficult with the small range of fonts available to web developers (Verdana, Times New Roman, and their ilk.)
sIFR might not be the most elegant way to accomplish this, but it is a necessary step towards accomplishing a goal that will be beneficial for web development.
If putting your headline in Times New Roman is really destroying the entire value of your content, then I suppose Fahrner Image Replacement or similar could be an acceptable solution.
What does it do? I still don’t get it?
It displays fonts that are not normally available for use in a browser. On systems where Javascript / Flash is not available, it displays regular text. It is particularly useful when you need to make the page look a certain way, but you can’t use an image because the text is dynamic.
I guess you could see it as unnecessary, since according to Shii, the web is simply a network of documents, meant to be displayed in plain text — or, if you need to get fancy, with very minimal basic html formatting — and any attempts to pretty something up beyond what is available in a standard released in 1998 are just silly. Things like accent images, colors, flash, javascript, and complicated tables or CSS just use resources and bandwidth, and should be eliminated so I can get to my gay porn faster. Right Shii?
That’s friendly of you.
I didn’t say Flash and Javascript were useless. They can assist in providing amusing Newgrounds movies or running webmail. And I will admit that CSS is useful because it often makes pages easier to read. But what does sifr do?