sIFR load before rest of page?

Question

Hiya,

Is it possible to have sIFR "preload" or load before the rest of the page content? At present it is the last thing to load (due to the text position) and as it's quite an obvious part of the page I get a huge mash-up of text replacement all in a quick flurry which is not very appealing.

It looks like the site is having an epileptic fit. Once loaded, all is fine though :)

Any work-arounds to the load-fitting?

Cheers Hugh

Answer 1

If I understand the way sIFR works, you need to have created the heading in the DOM before attempting to change it. To be honest, every site I've been to that uses sIFR has that slight flip on loading.

The answer then in my opinion, is no. I stand under correction though.

Answer 2

There are a two separate issues here:

1. Replacing the elements as soon as possible
2. Making the replacement as painless as possible

For #1, sIFR by default replaces the elements on document load. However, to make this work in Safari, check out http://wiki.novemberborn.net/sifr3/DetectingCSSLoad.

For #2, the problem, depending on the font used in Flash, is that the dimensions of the text are different from the HTML text. Check out http://wiki.novemberborn.net/sifr3/Ratio+Calculation to help lessen vertical jumpiness. You may need to tune the letter-spacing of the HTML text to lessen horizontal jumpiness.