Comments on: Oh sIFR, how I hate you

By: shii

shii — Thu, 10 Aug 2006 00:43:32 +0000

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?

By: t

Wed, 09 Aug 2006 15:27:34 +0000

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?

By: Brent Roos

Brent Roos — Tue, 08 Aug 2006 01:58:31 +0000

What does it do? I still don’t get it?

By: Shii

Shii — Mon, 07 Aug 2006 22:10:06 +0000

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.

By: Brendan

Brendan — Mon, 07 Aug 2006 18:53:29 +0000

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.

By: jdigital

jdigital — Sat, 27 May 2006 14:40:23 +0000

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.

By: adam

adam — Wed, 24 May 2006 13:55:28 +0000

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

By: shii

shii — Sat, 13 May 2006 05:09:39 +0000

It’s not useful to hackers, but it is malicious…

By: Chinese Chi

Chinese Chi — Sat, 13 May 2006 04:39:40 +0000

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.