Facelift Image Replacement(FLIR) is an alternate solution to sIFR. FLIR is similar to sIFR in that they are both used to accomplish the same goal but through the use of two completley different methods.
sIFR uses jQuery to replace headlines on a page with a flash headline while FLIR uses jQuery to replace any text on a page with a PHP generated image. Although, both technologies work well, they both have their disadvantages.
sIFR
- Works well with our designs and looks good.
- Supports multiple fonts.
- Loads quickly.
- Easily support styling on fonts like drop shadows and blur.
- Supports negative letter spacing.
- Supports hover color for links.
- Graceful failure, reverts back to the text version of the headline.
- SEO Friendly. Since it maintains the H tags search engines are able to index pages that use sIFR.
- Uses flash which isn’t supported by all visitors/browsers and maintains all of the same limitations of flash.
- Requires flash to export fonts to an SWF.
- Somewhat difficult to customize font/flash files.
- Requires A LOT of tweaking to the CSS to make the sIFR fonts match those on the design.
- Only works in H tags(I think)
FLIR
- Supports multiple fonts
- Works within most tags on a page(not just H tags).
- Automatically adjusts the size according to the font size on the page.
- Supports CSS styles.
- Uses images instead of Flash which means its very stable- it probably wont fail due to browser limitations like Flash might.
- Only requires jQuery to work.
- Well documented.
- Doesn’t require anything but a few lines of jQuery.
- Doesn’t support negative letter spacing.
- Probably uses PNG’s (I can’t be sure)
- Loads a little slow, kinda(the first time atleast).
- Might not be as SEO friendly as sIFR.
All-in-all I think that FLIR is the better solution. I haven’t had a chance to actually use it yet but it doesn’t seem to really have any major limitations. The technology isn’t fancy or new like with sIFR, it’s just a creative way of using it. The only real problem that I can foresee is that it doesn’t support negative letter spacing which gets used a lot of designs, in which case we would need to use sIFR or cut it as an image.
