sIFR 2.0.7: Flash 10 / Safari Compatibility Release

sIFR 2.0 - 2.0.5 failed to detect the Flash 10 player, and therefore falls back to normal HTML text. This had previously been resolved in sIFR 2.0.6, however an issue remained with Safari. There is a second Flash version detection, which had not been fixed, and resulted in transparency support being disabled for Safari browsers with Flash 10 installed.

If you are upgrading from sIFR 2.0.4 or older, you must upgrade the sifr.js JavaScript file and re-export your sIFR Flash movies using the sifr.fla file from sIFR 2.0.7.

If you are upgrading from sIFR 2.0.5 or 2.0.6, you must upgrade the sifr.js JavaScript file.

Update, December 1st, 2008: A new sifr-cs3-and-up.fla file has been added to the download. Use this file if you’re using Flash CS3 or later. Find out more.

Detailed Description

sIFR 2 uses the same Flash detection that was originally used in its precursor, IFR, back in 2004. Unfortunately this detection script only expected single digit Flash versions, so it fails to detect Flash 10. This has been fixed in sIFR 2.0.6. However, I missed a second Flash version detection, which was used to check for transparency support in Safari browsers. Back in the day, Safari did not support transparency with Flash 6, so an explicit check for Flash 7 was added. The second version detection failed to detect Flash 10, disabling transparency support under Safari.

Thanks to Giancarlo Gomez for originally pointing out the problem with the Flash detection, and Marco Della Pina for pointing out the Safari problem.

link | sifr | 16 October 2008, 20:59

Comments

Hi, We are from http://www.929webhosting.ca, heard this SIFR from various professional developers and have been watched in various highly ranked websites. We would like to experiment/implement in our websites.

Many thanks. http://www.929webhosting.ca

929webhosting | 17 October 2008, 12:35 | link
Awesome. Thank you so very much! We realized that many of our sites were now displaying something awful!! It’s all fixed, and it wasn’t hard at all. Thanks again.

Steve | 17 October 2008, 20:16 | link
Now that flash10 supports transparency on linux, it would be nice not to have fall back to a solid background. Thanks for this though, it’s amazing.

Brett | 18 October 2008, 22:25 | link
Thanks for the speedy update! My site was quite uglified for while.

The Y2K bug of sIFR, I guess.

Matt Wiebe | 19 October 2008, 00:14 | link
Thank you so much for posting this Flash 10 fix! I have been going insane all day trying to figure out why my sites suddenly looked ugly. IE was displaying just fine, but Safari, Chrome, and FF defaulted back to normal text. Thanks again!

Philip Arthur Moore | 19 October 2008, 14:00 | link
Brett, thanks for noting that. I’m not changing sIFR 2, but I’ll add it to sIFR 3.

Mark Wubben | 19 October 2008, 19:36 | link
Thank you a lot!

2.0.7 work great, but when I try use tag “em” to highlight color something is wrong and it doesn’t work. Please could you help?

Thank you!

Elena | 20 October 2008, 16:15 | link
Hi Elena. If you could post your question in the forum, accompanied by a live example page, that’d be great.

Mark Wubben | 20 October 2008, 16:45 | link
Thanks for the update. Unfortunately, when I try opening sifr.fla in Flash CS4 on my Mac, it says that the file cannot be opened. Has anyone else had this problem?

Chris Peters | 24 October 2008, 03:26 | link
Thanks for the update. Unfortunately, when I try opening sifr.fla (sIFR 2.0.7) in Flash CS4 on my PC, it says “Unexpected file Format”. Has anyone else had this problem?

cazanova | 28 October 2008, 06:03 | link
I have the same problem at my work. It won’t open with CS4.

Viljami Salminen | 29 October 2008, 14:08 | link
I don’t have CS4 here, but the .fla hasn’t changed in years. Bad thing if that’s now broken, but not sure what can be done about it. Anybody else having more luck with CS4?

Mark Wubben | 29 October 2008, 14:36 | link
Hi, sifr 2.0.7 dont work in Internet Explorer 6 & 7 and Flash 10.

Stoik | 30 October 2008, 19:27 | link
Hi Stoik. It works for me, so perhaps something went wrong with the Flash installation. By “not working”, do you mean there are errors, the movies don’t display, or you see HTML text? Try uninstalling the Flash player and then reinstalling it.

Mark Wubben | 30 October 2008, 20:13 | link
Hi, I have the same problem with the sifr.fla files not opening with CS4 on Mac. The message is “Failed to open document”.

So I tried creating a new one and I must not have something right in the export and/or Publish Settings. When I replaced tradegothic.swf with my new .swf in the sample code it doesn’t work. Hmm…

Todd O'Connor | 3 November 2008, 07:08 | link
Ugh, that’s annoying, but I don’t quite see how that could be fixed. Does it work under Windows?

How are you creating a new .fla? Seems to me there’s a big chance you create it incorrectly?

Mark Wubben | 3 November 2008, 10:59 | link
Mark,

It’s very probable that I don’t have the right set of options in my new .fla file. Are the set of options needed to recreate this documented anywhere?

I’ll try your .fla file on CS4 Win and let you know. This will be a fresh Flash install as well.

Thanks, Todd

Todd O'Connor | 3 November 2008, 23:04 | link
So I have wanted to use sIFR on clubsguide for some time now, and I have finally got some time aside to get on top of it, and now I cant open the fla file because I am using CS4?

Thats a bit of an anti-climax if you ask me.

Has anyone got a workaround for this?

I would love to have sIFR running on my site, but its not looking like happening in the short term if there is no way of getting around this bug.

For reference I am talking about the “Unexpected file type” issue when you try to open sIFR.fla in Adobe Flash CS4 Professional.

Any help would be very much appreciated!

Keep up the good work guys.

Cheers,

Shannon

Shannon | 4 November 2008, 06:51 | link
Todd, not really, no. You’ll have to set up the right holder and text fields, with the right names and settings, and load the ActionScript. There may actually be some ActionScript in the Flash movie.

Shannon, is that on Mac or Windows?

Mark Wubben | 4 November 2008, 20:28 | link
sIFR is also not opening up for us on CS4 for Mac OS X.

George | 5 November 2008, 18:22 | link
I’m getting the “Unexpected file format” error on Flash CS4 on PC (XP Pro). Downloaded directly from mikeindustries.com.

Nathan Strong | 6 November 2008, 00:06 | link
Nathan, that’s annoying! I’ll see what I can do, but in the mean time, perhaps you have access to an older copy of Flash?

Mark Wubben | 6 November 2008, 09:57 | link
Yep, the fla doesn’t open in CS4.

Nate | 7 November 2008, 00:24 | link
I can confirm it does not work on Flash CS4… Too bad. I am looking forward for a fix.

Ewald | 8 November 2008, 19:06 | link
Another error.

My firefox and my friend’s one either (he’s on mac, im on xp) do not load any SIFR. Not on our page, not on the example page.. never.. Whats the problem?

Ewald | 8 November 2008, 21:05 | link
Regarding the non-loading of sIFR, sounds like Flash isn’t being detected. Does the sIFR 3 demo work? If not, try uninstalling and re-installing the Flash player. If it does, are you using Flash 10 and 2.0.7?

Mark Wubben | 8 November 2008, 22:00 | link
This is a real problem.

I downloaded 2.07, re-exported my 20 or so fonts using Flash MX 2004 on OSX, uploaded the new files and — nothing. Even worse, no text at all displayed whereas before the unreplaced text was at least visible.

I’m not doing this for my own amusement, either; I have a commercial site running that’s pretty highly dependent on this working. Any ideas?

Tom McGee | 8 November 2008, 22:06 | link
Tom, could you make a post in the forum with a live example page? In any case, a quick test to see if the Flash movie is working OK is by opening it directly in a browser. It should show “Rendered by sIFR 2.0.7”.

Mark Wubben | 9 November 2008, 11:51 | link
My bad — I’d simply uploaded the new sifr.js file without copying the sIFR.replaceElement functions from my old version. It works now.

Tom McGee | 9 November 2008, 19:06 | link
Fantastic work on this, thank you.

With Flash Player 10 in Safari 3.1.2 (and with no hover colour set), I’m still seeing links inside my elements not being clickable under 2.0.7. Here’s a sample page. The replaced text reads “Vertigo Theme” and is centred.

Incidentally, if I right-click the sIFR headline and choose Copy Link, I see: asfunction:_root.launchURL,0

Matthew Buchanan | 11 November 2008, 07:22 | link
I haven’t found any mention of this bug elsewhere, so I hope you may be able to help. When viewing sIFR in Safari on Mac OSX the HTML text is displayed while the Flash is loading. It disappears when the flash displays, but this looks really ugly. By the way, this has been mentioned by other Mac users as well, so it’s not just my MacBook. Every other browser/OS renders it all perfectly, by the way. Is there a fix out there for Safari? Or is there a way of stopping Safari showing the sIFR and just displaying the HTML?

I just tried it on a PC-based Safari (Vista), and it does the same thing: HTML headings come up before the sIFR.

Any help?

Thanks

Mat

Mat Blackmore | 11 November 2008, 17:25 | link
Hi Matthew, I see you’ve switched to sIFR 3 now?

Hi Mat, there’s some CSS which should prevent that. Perhaps you can post an example in the forum?

Mark Wubben | 12 November 2008, 11:08 | link
Mark, yes I couldn’t make it work in 2.0.7 so in the end I took the plunge. 3 works really nicely!

Matthew Buchanan | 13 November 2008, 22:48 | link
Hi,

I noticed that sIFR uses “embed” tags for the Flash, which seems to make it incompatible with XHTML.

I’m assuming there are good reasons for this, but if there’s any discussion/articles about why, I’d be grateful if anyone could link them for me - to save me from hacking around trying to do something that’s unworkable. I’ve searched but come up blank.

(Big fan of sIFR btw, just trying to work out how to get it into a strict XHTML document without generating invalid markup)

Thanks,

Steve | 14 November 2008, 17:21 | link
sIFR 3 uses object, so you could (and should) use that.

I’d also like to note that whatever JavaScript inserts, does not have anything to do with validity of XHTML documents.

Mark Wubben | 15 November 2008, 16:20 | link
Sorry Mark, I wasn’t meaning to imply that you (or sIFR) were doing anything wrong, just trying to get to the bottom of this, and see what the options are.

Thanks for the heads up on V3, I’ll take a look at it. Keep up the great work

Steve | 17 November 2008, 11:34 | link
Thanks for the great information. We switched out the JS and re-exported the fonts. Everything is working again. This thread nailed it!

Jeffry McGee | 18 November 2008, 23:14 | link
Re opening in CS4 problem, we opened with CS3, saved as, and now it opens in cs4…

Andrew Crowe | 19 November 2008, 22:56 | link
Andrew, can you tell whether the sifr.fla file has been modified by opening in CS3?

Mark Wubben | 19 November 2008, 23:28 | link
I have Flash MX CS2, I tried using the latest nightly. The .fla file gives me same error when trying to open it, “Unexpected File Type”. So I used one of the online generators, (the one I used supports no higher than version 419. Would I be losing anything by downloading sIFR 3 r419?

Mick | 20 November 2008, 01:39 | link
Mark - the “new” fla is smaller (24kb) so I’m assuming the answer is yes… email me and I’ll send you a copy.

Andrew Crowe | 20 November 2008, 20:39 | link
Mick, the discussion here is about sIFR 2, which uses a far older .fla file. Don’t recall any issues with the sIFR 3 file though. And r436 is much improved over r419, though r419 is pretty good as well.

Andrew: done.

Mark Wubben | 20 November 2008, 22:44 | link
I just installed flash player 10 and lo and behold sifr no longer works in mozilla and in safari. But I downloaded the new js file replaced it with the old one and now it’s working again. I didn’t even bothered republishing the swf files. Wow you guys look great. Tnx for the fix.

Stone Deft | 28 November 2008, 19:36 | link
I too am getting the “Unexpected file format” error when I try to open sifr.fla in Flash CS4 on PC (Vista). Just wondering if there is fix for this bug in the works.

Kieran | 29 November 2008, 03:19 | link
Hi Kieran, I have a potential fix (a version of the sifr.fla file saved by CS 3) that I’m just waiting to see confirmed by a few people.

Mark Wubben | 30 November 2008, 18:16 | link
I’ve put up a new download, containing a fixed sifr.fla file for use with CS 3 and up. Read more.

Mark Wubben | 1 December 2008, 22:22 | link
Thanks for the fix guys. I literally just downloaded sIFR, ran into the bug and returned to the site to discover that I grabbed 2.0.7 only moments before the update. Appreciate the fix for CS4. Cheers!

Rob Tull | 2 December 2008, 06:01 | link
Hey,

I updated SIFR on my website but it now displays: Rendered by SIFR3 revision 278. instead of my original header texts. How can i fix this?

Greetings,

Martijn

Snuurtje | 11 December 2008, 14:28 | link
@Martijn, make sure the JavaScript and Flash movie are of the same sIFR version.

Mark Wubben | 11 December 2008, 23:40 | link
With sIFR 2.0.7, we’re having trouble with getting links to work, but only using .swf files we generate ourselves - the tradegothic.swf from the example works fine. Is there something specific we have to do when creating .swf files? We’ve tried using sifrgenerator.com and creating them ‘the long way’, so any help would be appreciated.

Thanks, Justin

Justin Alei | 3 February 2009, 13:16 | link
Justin, I wouldn’t quite know. You mean it’s fine if you swap out the movies you created for the example movie? The text itself does render?

Mark Wubben | 4 February 2009, 00:59 | link
Thanks for the reply Mark. Yes, it works fine when I use the example movie from the sifr zip (tradegothic.swf), but any others that I created myself don’t work. I used www.sifrgenerator.com for the ones I made, so I suppose it’s possible the option for version 2 isn’t the latest version (2.0.7) - however, it also didn’t work with a flash movie a colleague made the long way (via Flash).

In any case, I think it’s a moot point as I’ve started playing around with the latest release of sIFR 3 and I think we’ll be using this one. Though now I’m having different problems, but will ask in the forums.

Thanks, Justin

Justin Alei | 4 February 2009, 13:01 | link
http://www.vividnewmedia.co.uk/new/sifr/

On this site it will not work online but works locally? have added web addy into file and still no luck.

Craig | 12 February 2009, 00:10 | link
@Craig, works for me.

Mark Wubben | 13 February 2009, 23:06 | link
I got the same problem with CS4. I opened it under CS3 and saved it so i could open the CS3 saved fla

Cyberto | 16 February 2009, 09:39 | link
@Cyberto, there’s two Flash movies in the download, one is a movie that has been saved with CS3. That should work.

Mark Wubben | 17 February 2009, 22:09 | link
Hey,

sIFR is a great peace of software. I used it in many projects and I am really happy about the possibilities it offers. Many thanks for sharing your work and great ideas! :)

Best regards, Sebastian

Sebastian | 19 February 2009, 06:35 | link
When I download sIFR, I cannot open the siFR.FLA file in Flash. I get “Unexpected File Format” when I try. I’m using the latest version of Flash, Flash CS4. I’m on a PC, running XP. Any ideas what I’m doing wrong? I’m vary anxious to get started with sIFR

Tom Bowen | 24 February 2009, 04:44 | link
I’m sorry I posted before without having read all of the comments. I’ve just downloaded the latest version again, but there is no sifr-cs4.fla file. There is only one .fla file (named sifr.fla).

Where can I get the CS3 & up version?

Tom

Tom Bowen | 24 February 2009, 05:00 | link
Tom, if you download from the link on this page, it should include a sifr-cs3-and-up.fla file.

Mark Wubben | 24 February 2009, 09:57 | link
I tried to implement SIFR3 with my site www.petralian.com < fixed now using gif files but it is only until I can figure SIFR2 out… SIFR3 gave me unremovable margins on top and below I cannot get fixed and overflow/margin/height also doesnt seem to work… Is this also the case with SIFR2 or not? I rather first ask before I try another day of programming ;-)

Nathan | 29 March 2009, 10:47 | link
If the margins are inside Flash, you can fix it in sIFR 3 using tuneHeight and offsetTop. If the margins are outside Flash, you’ll probably have the same problem with sIFR 2.

Mark Wubben | 30 March 2009, 18:31 | link
Does anybody know where I can get the version fpr CS3 or CS4? Thanks for help!

Mike | 14 May 2009, 18:19 | link
It’s in the download linked to from this page.

Mark Wubben | 16 May 2009, 22:24 | link
Hi Guys,

Ok quite a basic problem here. I’ve just downloaded the sIFR 2.0.7 files and I’m using the index page as a base to start my page. Basically I’ve just turned the background to black and all the sIFR heading have a white background around them. I’ve checked all the CSS styles but there doesn’t seem to be anything relating to background colour.

Is this something I need to change in flash maybe.

Many thanks

Seb

Sebastian Barrymore | 20 May 2009, 02:51 | link
Hi Seb, this would be the background color setting for the replacements, in JavaScript.

Mark Wubben | 20 May 2009, 23:17 | link
Cheers Mark,

That’s brilliant. Really got me out of a tight spot there.

For future reference can I make the background transparent so I can use text on a gradient background??

Thanks again Seb

Sebastian Barrymore | 21 May 2009, 00:05 | link
Yes, though that is a different setting, and doesn’t work on all browsers.

Mark Wubben | 21 May 2009, 09:26 | link
Still can’t open it in flash CS4… any ideas?

regis | 29 May 2009, 18:19 | link
Which file did you try to open?

Mark Wubben | 30 May 2009, 21:21 | link
I’ve downloaded the current version from above (“Download sIFR 2.0.7”) and it looks like it doesn’t contain the file named “sifr-cs3-and-up.fla” that other people are mentioning.

It looks like this is the content of http://novemberborn.net/sifr/2.0.7/sIFR-2.0.7.zip:

all.css, customizeme.as, dontcustomize_me.as, index.html, index.xhtml, sifr-addons.js, sIFR-print.css, sIFR-screen.css, sifr.fla, sifr.js, tradegothic.swf, uncompressed js source (do not use)/sifr-addons.js, uncompressed js source (do not use)/sifr.js

I’d love to get ahold of this fixed version that seems to be working for others - am I missing something? Maybe I’m downloading the wrong file.

Thanks for all your work on this!

Jared Saunders | 31 May 2009, 21:37 | link
The download you link to should contain a sifr-cs3-and-up.fla file, which should be compatible with CS4. You don’t see it?

Mark Wubben | 1 June 2009, 22:48 | link
I don’t see the sifr-cs3-and-up.fla in the sIFR 2.0.7 download either.

mike | 25 June 2009, 01:26 | link
Make sure you download it from my site, I don’t think Mike’s download is fully up to date.

Mark Wubben | 29 June 2009, 09:53 | link