Web Fonts, Licensing and EOT
Over on the IEBlog, Bill Hill recently posted about Font Embedding on the Web. In it, he discusses how Microsoft has submitted it’s Embedded OpenType (EOT) file format to the W3C for standardization. This could be an important development for web typography, and here’s why.
Koebenhavn
So, I’m in Copenhagen now. It’s been a long while since my last post here, and people have been asking me to update more frequently – especially now that I’m an expat! Luckily I set the bar quite low, so no problem there ;-)
Speaking at Internetcreatieven Kennisdag
For the Dutchies reading this, Friday the 29th the Internetcreatieven Kennisdag mini-conference takes place in Delft. Speakers are André Weenink, who’ll be talking about design research in branding, Arjan Westerdiep, who’ll be premiering a pixel-art illustration consisting of no less than 1,664,000 pixels, Gert Hans Berghuis of Fabrique Communicatie & Design, and Bob Corporaal and yours truly. We’ll be speaking about happy marriages between Flash and HTML, with of course sIFR being a prime example.
Registration is only € 23,80, so I hope to see you there!
sIFR 3: r372 Zoom Away!
A quick update with regards to the beta. A number of issues have been found concerning page zoom and Firefox. These issues should all be fixed now. Other changes include:
- Several bugfixes regarding
forceSingleLine. - The XHTML demo was not built properly by the build script.
- Added support for
.sIFR-root { cursor: pointer; }. - Print preview in Firefox/Windows no longer throws errors.
- The
fixFocuscaused infinite recursion, but no more! - sIFR should no longer cause the page to “jump” when the window is resized, although the sIFR elements may flicker a bit.
- Text replaced through
replaceTextis now remembered after moving back to the page through browser history in Firefox.
sIFR 3 Beta 2: Fire Cracker
As years end nears, neighbourhood kids are playing with fireworks around the house. A nice homage to the second beta of sIFR 3 I’d like to imagine. Feature wise sIFR 3 is now complete, and I think it’s gotten pretty awesome. If you’re trying to decide between sIFR 2 and sIFR 3, sIFR 3 is definitely the better choice.
What is sIFR?
sIFR is meant to replace short passages of plain browser text with text rendered in your typeface of choice, regardless of whether or not your users have that font installed on their systems. It accomplishes this by using a combination of JavaScript, CSS, and Flash, which renders the font. It degrades gracefully if Flash is not present. sIFR 3 is open source and licensed under the CC-GNU LGPL.
How Do I Get It?
You can download the most recent version of sIFR 3 from the nightlies. If you want, you can subscribe to a feed for the nigthly releases. Major releases are also announced through the sIFR 3 Announce mailing list.
On DOM Load (and CSS, too)
On solutions for DOM load and CSS applied.
sIFR 3: Updates
Life’s busy as usual, but it’s been too long since I last wrote about sIFR. I’ve been working on sIFR on and off, so it’s moving slowly. That’s not to say nothing is happening, though! Since the last post there have been 40 new revisions. An oft-asked question is which revision should be used. Since sIFR is under constant development, it’s always a good idea to use the most recent nightly. So what’s the plan going forward? I intend to stabilize the current code base and release a second beta. After the beta is out I’ll be improving the speed of the code and writing documentation – this will likely result in some refactoring. Then one or two release candidates and we’re good to go for 3.0. Last Friday I gave two presentations about sIFR. One at Onstuimig in Amersfoort (they’re hiring too!) and one at Info.nl. I had a great time giving these talks and meeting web people here in Holland, so I’d like to do this more often. Let me know if you’re interested!
sIFR 3 Revision 278 Security Update
Yesterday, a security vulnerability was found in sIFR 2 and 3. Malicious websites can trick visitors into running JavaScript code on domains hosting sIFR movies. No exploits are known. If you are using sIFR 3, you are advised to update to revision 278 (or any later revision).
sIFR 3: Revision 229
sIFR updates!
sIFR 3: Revision 209
Cool updates for sIFR 3.
sIFR 3b1: The Mo’ Betta Beta
Just in time for Christmas, I present you a new sIFR release! It’s been a long time coming but with this release I feel sIFR 3 is ready for widespread deployment. There’s great control over how the text is rendered inside the Flash movie: you can easily use bold and italics together, or use different colors. There’s support for leading, kerning and opacity, filters, blend modes and anti-aliasing.
DOMContentLoaded: Test Cases and Musings
Discusses how to properly do DOMContentLoaded in Internet Explorer and tackles issues with Safari and Opera.
Crashing Firefox 1.0.0 in One Line of Code
I was looking at a bug report for sIFR today. It discussed how sIFR 3 crashed Firefox 1.0.0 on Windows. After the better part of the evening, here’s what I found: if you create a non-anonymous method, declare a variable inside it and set a property on the function object with the same name as the variable (and whatever value, I used null), Firefox 1.0.0 will crash after about ten seconds after loading the page.
Flash? Pure Evil
On Flash, filters and Reboot.
sIFR 3: Using SVN and About the Beta
Over the past few days I’ve fixed a number of bugs in the code and added some more Flash 8 related features. Here’s a quick post on how to stay up to date and some information about the beta.
sIFR 3 Alpha: Tasting the 3.0
It’s high time for a release of the new sIFR version, 3.0. With Inman’s Flash Replacement as the original, sIFR 1.0 making it scalabale and sIFR 2.0 bringing it to the masses, this version will really make things rock. Flash 8 has brought a lot of new, cool stuff. Now you can use these features, starting with way better font anti-aliasing and auto-kerning. You’ll also be able to use filters to do shadow effects.
sIFR 3 Feature List
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!
Font Sizing with sIFR
Font sizing is the most difficult part of using sIFR. In this post, I’ll discuss how the algorithm in sIFR 2 works, or rather, why it doesn’t work as well as originally intended. Coincidentally, this makes this post an excellent tutorial for font tuning in sIFR 2. We’ll also look at how things will be improved with sIFR 3.
Evolution
sIFR now does multiple colors, configured by CSS, and with better links. And it’s still missing a lot of features, and is probably incredibly buggy, but hey.
http://dev.novemberborn.net/sifr3/svn/test/demo.html
Next step: making it scalable.
Sources Are Telling Me…
I’ve made a development subdomain here at Novemberborn to host SVN exports of the sIFR 3 codetree and other development projects.
Quick: A Wiki!
I’ve updated the wiki software running wiki.novemberborn.net to a customized version of i2, the app behind the Ruby on Rails wiki. At first glance it’s a lot more responsive, and I hope it won’t go down as much as the previous incarnation.
sIFR 3: A Look into the Future
Some time ago Mike and I asked you what features you wanted to see in sIFR 3. While we haven’t defined the exact list of features for the new version it has become time to look into the future to see where sIFR is heading.
