6 Things You Wanted to Know About SiFR but Were Afraid to Ask

Apr. 28, 2010

Have you ever wondered what exactly siFR is or why you should use it? Have you ever had a burning question about siFR that you just never asked? Well we took the 6 most commonly asked questions we get about siFR and we've broken down the answers here, so you never have to worry about your understanding of the technology again.

What exactly is siFR?
Scalable Inman Flash Replacement (siFR) is an open source technology that allows you to replace text elements on a screen with Flash equivalents. SiFR uses JavaScript to read in HTML text and render it in Flash instead so that text elements can be styled in whatever font the web designer chooses, without the user having that font installed on their machine.

How is it pronounced?
According to one of the key developers involved in siFR’s creation, Mike Davidson, siFR is meant to be pronounced as “siffer."

Why should I use it?
SiFR has some key benefits for web designers including:

SiFR is accessible, selectable and most important, cross-browser compatible.
It does not violate end user license agreements (EULA) or copyright laws since the font is contained within the SWF object.
SiFR is SEO friendly, provided that keywords appear in the text.
Implementation of siFR adheres to semantic XHTML and accessibility standards. Sites which use siFR are fully accessible to screen readers and other assistive technologies.
SiFR is scalable which means that if a user has modified font size within their browser, it will fluctuate accordingly.
Last but not least, you can create beautiful typography for your web page.

What are the downsides of siFR?
SiFR is often criticized for the fact that it can cause pages to load slowly and is not supported by some mobile devices including the extremely popular iPhone. It requires both javasript and Flash to be enabled.

Will it hurt my SEO?
SiFR can be a fine technique with regards to your SEO as long as your keywords appear in the HTML text and it is used in moderation. However, extensive use of siFR can be interpreted as a poor site quality signal by crawlers, eroding SEO.

This is an example of siFR in action:

What alternatives are there?
This section gets a little technical (we apologize in advance) but for those who want to delve a little deeper into their options, here they are:

Facelift Image Replacement (FLIR) is similar software to siFR but instead of using flash, it embeds plain images that are generated automatically from the text on the webpage. This way, even if the user doesn’t have a Flash plugin installed, they will see the text replaced by FLIR. FlIR is also compatible with EULA and copyright laws since the font is rendered as an image. Unfortunately, FLIR requires that a website host is capable of running PHP with the GD enabled, which is even less accessible than Flash plugins and text cannot be selected.

Cufon is also a text replacement solution that doesn’t use Flash. Cufon consists of two individual parts: a font generator which converts fonts to a proprietary format, and a rendering engine written in javascript. Cufon is basically an improved version of the popular, Typeface.js with a focus on faster, easier implementation. Cufon works on every major browser, and there is almost zero configuration needed. Unfortunately, there are some deficiencies: not many fonts are permitted to be rendered in this method, the JavaScript files used for the font can be easily reverse engineered and “stolen” which violates EULA and copyright laws, and you cannot highlight or copy and paste text.

Typface.js allows you to show your site’s graphic text in the font you want without using Flash or images. Instead, you can use typeface.js and write in plain HTML and CSS, just as if your visitors had the fonts installs locally. Typeface.js is another alternative to using Flash, and is fairly simple to use. However, this option can slow down page load times significantly, it cannot be read by screen readers and it isn’t compatible with all browsers.