As I’ll have to focus on course-work and money-making-work in the next few weeks here is a feature list for sIFR 3. Of course, when something turns out to be too hard to implement, it’ll be removed from the list. Don’t take it for granted!
- Better and easier font sizing, as explained in Font Sizing with sIFR.
- FlashCSS: This lets you use multiple colors and different text styles in general. It also aids with link styling. Todd Dominey has a list of supported properties.
- Controlling kerning, leading and line-height.
- Font resizing.
- Better FlashBlock support (actually this’ll be a side-effect of the font resizing).
- Possibility to ignore specific elements during replacement.
- Modification of the content passed to sIFR.
- Pixel fonts.
- Flash 8 filters.
- Background images inside the Flash.
sIFR itself will be easier to use, and there’ll be a number of small fixes for edge-cases. Speed improvements are high on the list as well, obviously.
That will definitely be good! All the important future improvements are listed! well done. now we just need to sit and wait
Awesome, Mark. I have got to buy you a beer sometime.
I’m really really lookin’ forward to this!
I don’t know if this is a good place to do so, but I’ve got an idea for sifr3 I’d like to mention: Make the CSS selector engine a seperate and optional component. For instance, I like using jQuery, which has it’s own selection engine, so it’d be nice to not have duplicated funtionality. I could easily see a plugin for jQuery making some nice glue.
I might be a very niche case but I think that would be an excellent improvement for sifr3. Or how hard would it be to hack out the selector engine in sifr2?
Anyway, thanks for the work on sifr. I love it, and I hate it (those are my favorite type of things)
Hey Mitchell,
The selector code already lives in it’s own namespace, so I figure it’d be possible to replace it with a wrapper for jQuery or other implementations.
Mark,
What do you know? I find myself unsurprised. I probably could have found this out with a peek at the source, but thanks for the quick response.
Any chance we might see a fix for wrapping text? Currently if text wraps the text will also enlarge. (unless I am an idiot and this has already been fixed in some version)
Cody, it’s under “font sizing”
Mark, have you heard about the “content injection in flash with XHTML and sifr” method that was recently used to re-design the Pontiac web site?
I don’t like their choice to replace large swaths of text with this method, but it definitely has speed and flexability on its side. Their technique might contain some ideas that could be incorporated into sIFR3.
Hey Adam,
Yeah, I heard about it. I actually share your feelings regarding it’s use, but I don’t think they added anything which might be of use for sIFR 3. Could you elaborate, or was it just a hunch?
Thanks,
Currently when using sIFR, the background colour is declared in the .js file. This poses a problem with style sheet switching, ie. If the default body background is black you’d also get the sIFR’s to be black too. That is if you wanted it to match. However once switched to an alternate style sheet that has a different background colour, you’re left with the original black background of the sIFR text– which doesn’t look pretty.
sIFR can be transparent, however as I understand, it isn’t well supported. FlashCSS looks to be a saviour if the background attribute is supported through CSS, unless currently there is an alternative solution…
Mark: Just a hunch, really. The speed is what really caught my eye. Giving the sIFR3 demo another shot on a day that I don’t have 50 tabs open, however, I see that it’s already plenty fast. Great work!
So any ideas as to when sIFR 3 is slated for release?
Hi Daniel,
I’m still hoping before July, but I’m quite busy with other things too.
I’m extremely excited to see the kerning & leading (line-height) features. In many cases the default look is adqueate but being able to fine tune these essenital type attributes will seperate good type from excellent type.
Kudos again, I love V2 already.
Great Work! The work you guys are doing is amazing.
Not sure if anyone else has already mentioned this … if I add “font-style:italic” and “font-weight:bold” to .sIFR-root, sIFR will silently fail. Currently my work around has been to create a sFIR swf with bold and italic already applied.
Example: ‘.sIFR-root’ : { ‘text-align’: ‘left’, ‘font-weight’: ‘bold’, ‘color’: ‘#e29148’, ‘font-style’: ‘italic’}
Thanks again, I can’t wait for the final release!
Daniel, that’s because Flash doesn’t have the glyphs to render in italics or bold. Your method adds them, as intended.
Hi Guys
I have this scenario where ai have a h3 tag that contains an anchor tag. The h3 is replaced using sifr 3. I want the embedded link to not be blue and underlined. In the css I have color set for h3 a{color:#ff0000;} but it is not honored. I have the color set in the h3 replace rule also but it is not passed down to the link. What do I do to change the colour of the embedded link within the replaced h3?
Cheers
Mart
Styling for inside the Flash movie happens in the JavaScript config.