As much as I like the people doing it I hope sIFR Flash text replacement doesn’t take off. It slows my browser to a crawl and is used far too much in situations where images and CSS image replacement could be used. (Also looks funny with Adblock but that’s nobody’s fault.
Not going into whether it is a good or bad idea, it does have a few advantages over using images.
I would think that bandwidth-wise, this would be lighter than images. Plus you don’t really have to worry too much about optimising the images to bring the size down. Clarity of vector text is always better than raster text — I’m sure nobody will counter that. Etcetra.
But yes, of course, like you pointed out, it can be a resource hog and it can be abused.
Just like everything else.
Yes, I think it’s “too much hacking,” just to get the text to look right. Although it is intriguing.
Matt, you use PHP to generate your headlines, right? Is there possibilities with that?
“it slows my browser to a crawl”
What browser are you using, I have no problem here. Look interesting.
Do you know how annoying it’d be having to refresh (and wait) everytime you resized your window. I like to be able to see everything I’m doing all at once, I fit all my windows around each other so I don’t have to keep clicking through them all looking for the right one.
As an aside, I’d like to know if there’s a program for windows that emulates the OSX function that arranges all of the open windows (or all the open windows for one program) and shrinks them down so they can all be seen. I have a dual monitor setup but even now It’d be a handy tool to have.
Back on topic: there are (and always will be) people who prefer presentation over content and vice versa. It’s just a matter of picking where in the continuum you’d like to sit and try to convince others it’s the right way of doing things.
The major thing going against it is the way it is described on that page. The guy that wrote that sounds like he thinks he just saved humanity. I stopped reading after about the 4th paragraph, because it was all too obfuscated to bother with.
Dale, Firefox on Windows and Mac. I don’t know if it’s the technique itself as much as people using it to put 20-30 discrete flash items on a page. One such page literally crashed my browser last night and took a dozen tabs with it. The design was beautiful, but I’m not visiting that guy’s site again.
Will, that’s not nice.
Yeah you are right…my fingers got ahead of my brain on that one.
Will, Will, Will…
Jeff Croft’s site indeed is as slow as molasses in January, although I don’t think this is that bad of an idea. Maybe the project just needs to grow a little more… Erm, no—that doesn’t make sense. Growing won’t speed the whole thing up, right? Oh well.
Just checked out that site Matt. Firefox jumped to about 50% CPU usage but it was far from crashing. I think this technology maybe useful in the future when computers are powerful enough to cope with it.
Matt said:
> took a dozen tabs with it.
You need a browser with sessions 🙂
I could just hit the off button on my computer, and Opera will load those tabs right back up!
Back on topic: I’ve written a version which handles window resizing. No need to reload/refresh. It fixes some of the other bugs too (such as non-selectable text, and it has proper line wrapping to boot). Check my site in a couple of days if you want to see it.
Douglas