What are cons to use sIFR, in terms of , development time, accessibility, speed and mobile devices?

Question

What are cons to use sIFR, in terms of , development time, accessibility, speed and mobile devices?

Some cons Which i know.

• Rendering speed of pages will be slow because of it use JavaScript and FLASH both
• sIFR text will not be shown in Iphone safari and blackberry. and if it will be shown in other mobile browsers then browsing will be more slow.
• JavaScript and Flash player both needed in user's browser
• If we try to select sIFR text along with normal text or two sifr text than selection highlight will not be shown for sIFR text.
• Sifr has differene style mecanism so we will need to look after style in sifr-config.js, sifr.css and our own project's css. some time for some cross browser problems we will have to see in all files.
• We cannot put sifr js at bottom if we will do then sifr text will be load after other elemts

Some pros Which i know.

• cross browser compatibility for desktop browsers
• text can be selected, copy and paste
• graceful degradation (if JS will be disable then simple text will be shown, and even if CSS is we can see normal text)
• screen reader compatible
• sifr text is scalable also

My question are:

• How much site will be slow if i use sIFR in compare to simple text?
• Is there any Free or open source, easy to implement, lighter solution With all features of sifr + iphone and blackberry compatibility but without Flash needed.?

Answer 1

the main con of sIFR is cufon it's faster, smaller and flash free. BUT you can't select the replaced text anymore.

Answer 2

sIFR is the best solution as far as I know, but I would avoid using it on mobile devices though. Maybe you can make some mix of Cufon and sIFR, where you use Cufon for the mobile part and sIFR for the other browsers.

Answer 3

sIFR is slowly becoming an outdated and overly complicated technique. Shaun Inman the designer who invented it now relies on Cufon instead. See this post where he even says:

"Fast-forward three years. Cufón is sIFR’s heir apparent."

http://shauninman.com/archive/2009/04/17/pxr_cufon_pxfon

But let's talk about sIFR. The pros:

1. Fairly reliable cross-browser.
2. Works with any modern JS enabled browser with flash 7/8 installed.

Cons:

1. It can be a PAIN to setup. It's not that easy to maintain but it's not a nightmare.
2. Text does not resize properly if the user adjusts their browsers text size.
3. It breaks in fluid layouts.
4. It won't work on mobile browsers that don't support flash (and even then I don't know if the mobile version of flash is capable of supporting sIFR
5. It's latent / slow loading. The browser has to perform a lot of calculations to properly replace HTML elements with flash movies and calculate the text dimensions for the flash movie to render.

Bottom line is it's very limited and fast becoming out of date. My advice would be to look into Cufon:

http://cufon.shoqolate.com/generate/

Or rely on a service like TypeKit and only support nice fonts in modern browsers:

http://typekit.com/

Remember it doesn't need to look the same in every browser. Just provide acceptable solutions for each. In all due respect waiting for sIFR to take place on a page loading in IE6 is much more annoying than just seeing helvetica instead of the font your designer fell in love with.

Disclaimer I am a designer and have worked as a designer for several agencies during my career!