Archive for January, 2007

From time to time I’ll be posting about what’s going on in the sIFR nightlies. Today is such a time, with a lot of interesting changes! I won’t go into too much detail as it’s all documented on the wiki, so here’s the list:

• Support for pixel fonts through the pixelFont argument. See JavaScript Methods: replace.
• A way to stop the page jumps by specifying the ratios argument. (More about ratios). See JavaScript Methods: replace.
• Support for fixed font sizes and sizes relative to the main size, see font-size in Styling.
• Simplification in the API, you can now pre-fetch by passing the movies to activate() instead of prefetch(). See the How to use.
• Improved pre-fetch code for Internet Explorer.
• Laid groundwork to communicate with the Flash movies. Test it!.

Ain’t that cool? You can find r209 under the nightlies.

A Word About That Pre-Fetching Improvement

There were a few reports about sIFR overwriting the class name on the body element in Internet Explorer, but only on the first load. This has been fixed in this revision, and here’s the background for the bug:

It only happened on initial load because the issue was caused by the pre-fetch code, which only runs once per browser session. Pre-fetching was done by document.write()ing an embed element to the document. As it turns out this forced Internet Explorer to create a body element. (It behaves the same for any other element which should be in the body).

Results of this are breaking the *:first-child+html IE 7 CSS hack and overwriting class names on the body. After sIFR sets the class name IE won’t use the class names from the real body element anymore.

The solution is to write a script tag, which does not have the effect of IE creating the body element. Other software, such as Mint suffers from the same problem. I’ve already reported this to Shaun Inman, but in case you keep seeing the problem even with this revision make sure the Mint JavaScript is loaded after sIFR has been activated.