In a previous post, I was commiserating with an author who wrote an article about the use of typography for html websites and the restrictions that we, as graphic designers, experience. I went on complaining that technology for websites with regards to html typography hadn’t changed in 12 years. Well, if you read last week’s postings by Mick, our Director of Interactive Media, you, like me… are thrilled! Scalable Inman Flash Replacement (sIFR) is just the answer. It’s as if I called out to the Gods of typography and they heard me… just like when I was waiting and waiting for our window installer to call back, then had a dream about him building me a piano, and he called the very next day.

So, I decided to check out this new technology (this Godsend). I took about a half hour this morning and read through the documentation, the how-to-use files and sample files, and got to work. I would like to preface what I’m about to write by stating that I AM NOT A PROGRAMMER. I change what I need to change, upload what I need to upload, and save what needs to be saved. Sometimes it works and sometimes I fail miserably, but thankfully one of our very talented and personable programmers, Amy, is located two offices down from mine and always ready to help.

Basically, all that is required is setting the typeface in Flash, exporting it as a .swf file, and calling it up within the Javascript in the html page. Magically, at least for me, the type is just as I want it to look: search engine friendly, linkable, and selectable. I’m very excited to implement this new technology in future websites we design. We can now have the best of both worlds… great looking type on websites that work!

Now, I only hope someone reads my post about wanting a new SLR digital camera….

Fonts. Why did it have to be fonts. A quick recap of the my last post: Fonts need to be HTML so that search engines can see them, but web-safe fonts are very limited (to about 6) so designers cannot make things as pretty as they would like. That is until now. Introducing Scalable Inman Flash Replacement (sIFR).

As stated normally, HTML and CSS allow you to use any font but there is no guarantee that it will show up as intended because the user may not have the specified font installed in their system. sIFR on the other hand allows website headings, pull-quotes, and other elements to be styled in any font by enabling the designer to embed the font of their choice in a Flash element that displays the text.

As a result the font used does not have to be installed on the user’s machine…. but wait, if it is just flash then we’re back to the same problem of it being invisible to search engines. But No time to argue. “Throw me the idol, I’ll throw you the whip.” What happens it is uses some fancy Javascript magic, Essentially, any assigned headings (h1, h2, etc…) will be converted to Flash files with the embedded font when the website is loaded. However, any search engine spider coming through your site will still be able to read all of the page content.

sIFR requires JavaScript to be enabled and the Flash plugin installed in the reading browser. If either condition is not met, the reader’s browser will automatically display traditional CSS-based styling instead of the sIFR rendering.

sIFR is not designed for body copy text as rendering greater bodies of text with Flash place formidable demands on the computer.

The acronym AJAX stands for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. Ajax is a ground breaking powerful technique in web application. Ajax enables a web application to function just like a desktop application. The ability to retrieve information from the server without actually refreshing and loading the page and having a JavaScript function display the information in the page for the user is the general ideal of Ajax. Ajax enables many possibilities for user interactivity such as drag-and-drop operations, pop-up menus, downloading images in the back-end. One applicable functionality in which I have implemented with JavaScript for a web application is relational drop down list. For example if you have several drop down list, where selecting the first list will result in a list of category, subcategory and nth-category from the second list to the nth-list of data. Conventional ways of doing this would be to select the first item from the first list and submit the page and the server would yield the necessary relational result, which is unpractical. However, with Ajax techniques this can be done without submitting the page every time you make a selection. Asynchronous request is sent to the server behind the scene and new relational data are available for the user with each selection.

Ajax is the new trend in technology for future web programming, which makes web applications more enriched for the user experience.